blend27 - 12:11 am on Feb 17, 2010 (gmt 0)

Besides, if I were Google, I would penalize sites that do this.

jomaxx, I truly appreciate your opinion on country based blocking, but it would not make a financial sense for Google to penalize sites that do this. If the "user" clicks on SERP Link and leaves the GORG SERP, there is less monies to be made from Ads.

For some reason I believe that Sally's list(or some sort of it) of the countries to allow access from to the site is a very common practice among SMB Ecommerce stores. I don't think G should use that in the formula to rank the sites based on that fact. I could also understand the user frustration.

I've blocked India(and several other countries) close to/over 5 years ago on our main store that sells certain widgets that are very popular among women population. I posted a note with the email address to contact us directly with request to allow them access but also to specify a reason for the request.

To this day I have unblocked 2 IP ranges for the people who actually expressed interest in widgets. And at the same time ignored over 600(referrers are from page 34 in SERP for "link exchange +widgets + add url") of them that contained a reason as to them evaluating our site for a possible link exchange, guaranty top 10 in Google SERP, PPC Management (just last monththey've noticed that our copy on the ads was not good enough - this site used AdWords for 2 month 6 years ago) and some occasional promotions and timely business opportunities(I actually waited till promotion time limit expired and only then ignored it ;)) … See what I mean.

All though the original blocking decision was based on the Extra Abusive Bot Activity, constant Comment/GuestBook Spamming and several attemps to place orders with STOLEN CCs. Again this was not just for India.