There may be several reasons why one would want to block users from all countries except the targeted one: with large amounts of traffic this can be a solid way to save on bandwidth, or this can have something to do with content licensing restrictions, or this can be an additional step to fighting web spam and hacker attacks.
Anyway, while the reasons are clear and also we know how to do that (via IP address blocking, browser language detection, etc), there may be quite a few disadvantages:
- As being discussed in this forum thread, territorial blocking may not be really good for word of mouth (we know that the Chinese and Indian people who are often blocked from some US-based web resources are really active on Digg and StumbleUpon and it is often due to them that the piece goes viral);
- The web is flat, that being said there isn’t much you can do to block anyone from anything today: there are plenty of broadly available tools and apps that allow people to browse the web no matter what country they are actually located in: nowadays you don’t need to be a hacker to access any blocked site. So why bother blocking one?
- Often this is just against user experience: think about those people from your country who travel a lot and can’t access your site from other countries.
- I don’t know any evidence of direct impact on SEO, this may damage your SEO efforts indirectly: by limiting your site to only one country, you get fewer links and thus your link profile looks less diverse and hence less powerful.
So there seems to be good reasons to block users by country (in some cases) as well as solid arguments against doing that. What are your thoughts?
Ann,
I actually recommended this to a client a few years ago. The captcha on their lead gen form wasn’t working against the hand submitted spam from India.
The client only dealt with people who had legal problems inside the United States. So it made perfect sense to me to block those IP addresses.
It is not a good idea to block a particular country visitors. Sometime we will loose some leads from that particular country.
Interesting topic and I keep insisting this to our clients not to block users visitors by country.
I don’t like the idea.. It is just not good to block by country..
They are just reader.. Maybe for marketing product much more suit
My business is focused on one city, and I did consider blocking some countries for a few reasons. I am not so certain that someone will read my blog when they leave the country on a trip;however, my site has generated clients who were moving into my area from those countries. You never know. I actually ended up with a productive discussion with people in my field (real estate/construction) who are in India.
It’s bad enough the Big Three search engines don’t honor Geo-targeting meta-tags. They _ought_ to, implicitly. Every business has unique needs – and customers. Some want to be global, others need to address their demographic – and local geographic to succeed.
Websites NEED to be able define this in site headers – and the Engines need to respect this. But heck, they’re only _beginning_ to get a grip on the Canonical ‘www’ or not issue! Such a long way to go before true geo-targeting – or blocking – will be easy to declare.
If you evaluate click fraud you will find that it comes from very specific regions… for this reason it may make sense not to serve your ads to that demograhic.