Using hreflang tag to noindex for a specific country?

[evanhall]

I have a website ranking in a country that we don't service, but we do service all of the other countries we rank in.

I need my website to not rank in one specific country. Search Console's country targeting is out, because it's either one country or all countries. That leaves hreflang tags.

Is it possible to point an hreflang tag to a page that contains a noindex tag, and still have Google honor the hreflang tag? Google sometimes prevents webmasters from shooting themselves in the foot. Is this one of those cases?

Has anyone pulled off anything similar?

[aakk9999]

I am not sure about this and also not sure whether Google would then decide to rank the alternate country page instead. But you could try with handful of pages first and see what happens.

[sangi]

I'm with aakk9999, just pic a few top ranking pages from particular country's SERP and test it. On the other hand, isn't it a plain business opportunity you trying to get rid of?

[JS_Harris]

Don't do it, hreflang is a suggestion, it is not a guaranteed method of telling Google which search engine to rank the site in. All bots share the same cache. You can test that by putting the wrong hreflang on a page and, most likely, the page will move very little in rankings. The content of the page itself is understood even on sites without a proper hreflang tag.

URI's are permanent, hreflangs are not. You would be telling Google to index a page, or not index it, despite it being the same URI. Since your hreflang tag would change by location but the URI would not I do suspect you'd run into problems.

Your best bet might be to geo target the country you don't serve and show them a country specific version of your site, perhaps redirecting all page requests from there to a page that explains you don't serve that country, yet.