Can GEO blocking affect my site's SEO?

Can GEO blocking affect my site's SEO?

demib
Shopify Partner
135 13 65

There can be many good reasons that you want to limit access to your shop from some countries. Maybe you get to many fake orders from some countries or maybe you just don't want to deal with consumers in aggressive countries in war. 

 

Limiting who can purchase may not be enough - maybe you want some not to be able to enter your shop at all. 

 

For that you need a GEO blocking app - also called IP-blocking. 

 

BUT there is one big problem with GEO-blocking that I did not find any apps adressing: SEO!

 

The problem is that if you end up blocking countries and IP's that is used by Google (or any other search engine) to crawl your site they can't crawl it - and as a consequence they will (sooner or later) remove you from the index. 

 

You may think that Google always crawl from servers in the US, so if you do not block US IPs you are safe. But that is not true. We simple can't be 100% sure. And as always with SEO I prefer fully reliable solutions. 

 

Google does publish a list of IP's that they crawl from - but that list is NOT guaranteed to always be updated. I just recently confirmed this the hard way - a client was on a host using this list but as Google crawled from other IP's the client's site suddenly was getting removed from Google. That is bad! You do NOT want to run that risk!

 

Anyway, as I could not find any GEO-blocking app where I could be 100% sure it would not block Google - and as we wanted one in response to the war against Ukraine, my team and I made one. And it has just been added to the Shopify App Store.

 

It is free to use and you can add it here:
https://apps.shopify.com/geo-blocking-russia 

 

We use a third party IP-list for the app. The first 100,000 visits is free. If you store have more than that you will need to pay the IP-list service a fee. But the app will remain free forever. 

SEO Geek since 1996, consultant author and public speaker. Admin of the Shopify SEO Facebook Group

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Replies 2 (2)

SteveinCorona
Excursionist
16 1 2

Sounds interesting. A few questions:

  • Can I block visits from EVERYWHERE except US and Canada?
  • Is there a setting which allows the targeted subsets US and Canada, blocks all others?
  • Your app indicates it blocks human visitors. What about other non-human invaders crawling?

If possible Im verry interested. Thank you Steve

demib
Shopify Partner
135 13 65

Thanks! 🙂

That is actually a very good suggestion. In the current version you would have to add all countries you want to block but we will definitely look into your suggestion to block all - except for XX 

 

The app blocks all users that is not on our positive list of major search engine spiders. Other invaders most often fake user agent, and we never know which IP's they come from, so a GEO-blocking app will not be able to stop them. You need a server solution for this which is not possible to make with an app. 

However, Shopify is already trying to block such visits and in general it appear to me they do a pretty good job with this.

 

Do you experience a lot of "invading" visits?

SEO Geek since 1996, consultant author and public speaker. Admin of the Shopify SEO Facebook Group

Was your question answered? Kindly mark it as an Accepted Solution 🙂