A Way to Prevent Google From Serving My Pages In India?

[Sally Stitts]

I am not a programmer.
Is there a way to prevent Google from indexing and serving my web pages in certain foreign countries, such as India, Pakistan, China and Malaysia?
Reasons -
- Reduce content theft
- Prevent AdSense ads from being served, thereby improving all my AdSense stats

I am quite popular in India and Pakistan, and I don't want to be. I feel that showing my pages over there is costing me money, additional competition and lowered ranking.

I think I saw an old post about putting something on my Apache server (rejection IP ranges?), but that you had to input a lot of data. Ideas?

[graeme_p]

This discussion did prompt me to do some checking for how much scraping there was, and I sent a DMCA notice to the US based host of a blog that copied and pasted stuff with no acknowledgement, and that had no contact details.

Most copies of my text on sites that rank at all are on Yahoo Answers. Maybe I should start a thread to discuss that.

[kidder]

On one of our sites I need to block all users from India, they have no business on the site other than to spam our members which is exactly what I find them doing every single day so far this month. As soon as we ban them another one comes along....

[Reno]

Oh how I would love to have a way to easily block and/or allow by country, and I've wanted it for a very long time. Like many people, I'm very hesitant to mess with Apache settings, for fear of doing more damage than good. In an ideal world, I would do it via my hosting control panel, where there'd be a listing of all countries with a little check box next to each. I'd go through, make my selections, and hit "Save". The host/cPanel programmers would do the rest. A list like this could be integrated into a backend IP database, so as they were changed or reassigned, the update would be immediate, without any input from me. Yes I understand that some sophisticated users would go to proxies, but in general 95% of the wasted bandwidth would be saved. If any of the cPanel developers are here at Webmaster World... please please please make it so!

............................

[Staffa]

I've had a GeoIP database in place for several years and it works perfectly. No spammers, no sql hackers, nor any other unsavoury visitors. On one of my sites I occasionally unblock a range if the visitor(s) come back several times and for the right reasons depending on the referral URL.

I update the dbase about twice a year and will do so for many years to come and if any manual check from any of the SEs don't like it, tough, I don't tell them how to run their business so they better stay out of mine. Anyway, so far traffic is good as is crawling so no complaints there.

[blend27]

-- dropped on their machine when they were resident at home --

g1smd,

Spam Bots got smarter than that a while back. I see a proxy hit from Brasil and then a Post to a form from Vietnam with the same cookie, followed couple of GETS by either a Comcast or RR IP with same cookie a few minutes later, every day, AND Block them or throw A CHALENGE.

Western citizens on holiday should enjoy the holiday and not try to get a fix on the latest from .....
Biz people that travel Overseas should use VPN.

That is what I would do anyway.

[tedster]

Blocking visitors from different countries is something individuals can do on their own server - but there's no way to get Google to block your results just for users from a given country.

Your choices are either to be indexed or not-indexed. Being blocked for just some Google users is not in the cards.

[kidder]

Tedster, how would you expect Google to react to country filtering by webmasters at either server or htaccess level? Say Google had a crawl that originated from a country that was blocked for example? If my pages are blocked from Indian users then I would expect Google will deal with that situation swiftly and emit us from the local results. The sort of spam I'm dealing with is amateur stuff but it still takes up my time, these clowns are not smart enough to use proxies I don't think so a simple country block should be enough.

[tedster]

You might expect that, but I haven't heard of things happening that way.

There are enough members here who do block one country or another - I don't have a site that uses IP banning so I can't say. Maybe we'll get a report on that from someone.