SERPs and Blocking Countries

[Simsi]

For reasons I won't go into, one site I work with has made the move of blocking certain countries from the Middle East and Far East by presenting visitors from those jurisdictions with a simple message.

Around the same time, a lot of longtail rankings dropped from Google.com which could be due to any number of factors but I need to try and rule out if this is one of them.

Anyone any thoughts?

Many thanks.

Simsi

[grippo]

Any chances for Googlebot seeing responses for blocked countries?

[Simsi]

Sorry grippo I'm not quite with you? The pages return a 200 OK even in blocked countries but the content shown there is clearly very different (a simple message).

[phranque]

what method is used to classify visitors from those jurisdictions?

[grippo]

Hi @simsi, because of what you replied, which was clearly stated before, i'm asking if is there any chance that Googlebot is seeing the simple message. Can you tell that?

[Simsi]

@phranque: geoIP package used in PHP code

@grippo: Google from those local jurisdictions will be yes but (in theory) only from those areas. Also, looking at the results in google.com, it seems to have snippets from the page I would hope Google is seeing rather than from the simple "go away" message, so that's good at least.

[phranque]

it could be caused by secondary effects such as lost inbound links from these jurisdictions or degraded visitor engagement metrics.

you should be able to verify if googlebot's requests would have triggered the alternate content by analyzing your server access logs.