When I was going through webmaster world Google forum I saw this weird post<\/p>\n
How to stop my site from showing up on non-US Google results<\/p>\n
Wow one second it took me by surprise I seriously want to checkout why someone really wants to block access to their site from non-Google results. Here is the post from that person<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst, I want to make clear, I am not worried about bringing my page rank up at
all, I just want to stop showing up on non-US google results. So this isn’t
about SEO.
I have a site serving the SE United States. However, 80% of my
visitors come from Ireland, Israel, China, Japan, Italy, South America, and of
all places, Botswana?
I used some google tool (I can’t remember which) that
showed my page rank on non US google indexes varies from 4 to as high as 7.
That would explain the off-continent percentage, because I have a white bar
\/ page rank 0 here. So…
1. Is there really a different feed for different
countries?
2.Can I keep google indexing for US users but not others?
3.Is it one googlebot gathering data for all places, or are there different
ones? (That would explain why there is some google-thing on my msg boards every
day. Or there is one google bot and he lives at my place.)
4.To block them
or it, do I have to know the name of every bot and spider by IP or nickname or
whatever?
5.Is that done by htaccess or robots.txt?
\u201c<\/p><\/blockquote>\nFrom reading the post it looks the poster really wants to stop traffic from all countries other than Google. I don\u2019t think this is possible since google.com results are served in almost all countries though ranking might vary.<\/p>\n
A good response by senior member lammert was made which was very informative<\/p>\n
\u201cGeographic targetting boosts ranking in one region compared to others, but it
doesn’t remove a site from foreign search results. My experience is that it has
no greater power than a country TLD like .de for Germany or .fr for France, or
hosting your site on an IP address which is locate in the country to target.
1. Is there really a different feed for different countries?
No, every
Google datacenter can produce the results for all countries and languages in the
world by just changing a few parameters in the search URL. Google tries to sort
the results based on relevancy, matching languages and geographic origin of
incoming links to a site, but in principle every URL can appear in every SERP on
every visitors location. There is no such thing as totally separate feeds.
2.Can I keep google indexing for US users but not others?
3.Is it one
googlebot gathering data for all places, or are there different ones? (That
would explain why there is some google-thing on my msg boards every day. Or
there is one google bot and he lives at my place.)
There is just one
Googlebot crawling for all countries and data centers. If you are on one Google
data center, you are practically speaking in all, because they exchange pages on
the fly. There is even data sharing behind the scenes between different Google
spider technologies. If Googlebot doesn’t visit a specific URL but Mediabot
which is used for AdSense ad matching is, the pages fetched by Mediabot may be
examined and used by Googlebot.
There is no way you can block your site from
showing up in Google results for one country and not for others, unless your
site is China related and happens to trigger a filter in Google’s China
firewall.
The only way to tackle this reliably is to block the foreign
visitors at your door, i.e. use some form of geo targeting where you map the IP
address of the visitor to a geographical location and allow or deny access based
on that. But geo targeting is not 100% reliable, especially with some larger
ISPs like AOL which use a handful of proxies for all their customers and you may
end up with some foreign visitors slipping through, and worse, a number of
legitimate visitors who can’t connect anymore.
My advice is not to fight the
battle against foreign visitors, but to monetize the traffic. Many people are
fighting for traffic and you–wanting to kill 80% of your traffic because it
doesn’t match the current content of the site–are really an exception. Why not
monetize this traffic in some way instead of blocking people? This is free
traffic which is in principal targeted audience, based on that they found you
through Google search, and not some form of shady traffic generation scheme.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\u201c<\/p>\n