Removing site from a country specific SERP... Is it possible?

[AjiNIMC]

This is a very strange requirement from one of our client. There is some issue in Holland with the website, so they don't the website to appear in searches from Holland. Is it possible?

* People will be able to open the website by typing the url on the broswer directly (so no IP ban required).

I wonder if this is possible? Its an urgent requirement, help needed.

Thanks,
Aji

[tedster]

No way that I've ever heard of, Aji. There's no pick-and-choose by country in the current set-up, except for some cases of local country laws that Google handles automatedly. Googlebots all share one crawl-cache these days, too.

[AjiNIMC]

Tedster,

Thanks for the answer. Even I guessed so but I need to convince the client. I am wondering how do I do it :).

One way is to block the site for the whole country using IP block (either by .htaccess, httpd.conf or php), do we have other ways?

Regards,
Aji

[exposure]

If you don't want to ban all users by using a IP block, but just ban country-specific users coming from search engines, you can do a conditional check when visitors arrive.

Each click from an SE contains a cgi variable http_referer. If your code checks for a http_referer from Google.nl and then you further check for users in Holland based on IP address you could then conditionally show those who match some different content - or no content.

Then again, Google doesn't like you showing their users something different than normal site visitors so you'd risk a penalty or removal altogether (in all countries) when doing this.