Blocking a websites to certain countries

Need best practice advise

[SEO_Maggot]

Hi,

I am working on the SEO of an online gaming platform - a platform that can only be accessed by people in certain countries, where the games and content are legally allowed.
Example: The games are not allowed in the USA, but they are allowed in Canada.

Present Situation:
Presently when a user from the USA visits the site they get directed to a restricted location page with the following message:

RESTRICTED LOCATION
Due to licensing restrictions, we can't currently offer our services in your location. We're working hard to expand our reach, so stay tuned for updates!

Because USA visitors are blocked Google which primarily (but not always) crawls from the USA is also blocked, so the company webpages are not being crawled and indexed.


Objective / What we want to achieve:

The website will have multiple region and language locations. Some of these will exist as standalone websites and others will exist as folders on the domain. Examples below:
domain.com/en-ca [English Canada]
domain.com/fr-ca [french Canada]
domain.com/es-mx [spanish mexico]
domain.com/pt-br [portugese brazil]
domain.co.in/hi [hindi India]

If a user from USA or another restricted location tries to access our site they should not have access but should get a restricted access message.
However we still want google to be able to access, crawl and index our pages.

Can i suggest how do we do this without getting done for cloaking etc?

Would this approach be ok? (please see below)

We continue to work as the present situation is presently doing, showing visitors from the USA a restricted message.
However rather than redirecting these visitors to a restricted location page, we just black out the screen and show them a floating message as if it were a model window.

Visitors verified as Googlebot would be allowed to visit and crawl the website.

I have also read that it would b good to put paywall schema on each webpage to let Google know that we are not cloaking and its a restricted paid page. Even though many pages would be public pages available to everyone we only want users in allowed countries to be able to access them.

Any feedback and direction that can be given would be greatly appreciared as i am new to this angle of SEO.

Sincere thanks,
Mark

[not2easy]

Hi SEO_Maggot and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

You can allow Google to crawl but the paywall schema - if not realistic - would not be a great idea for publicly viewable pages for people who are not location restricted.

Are you using Cloudflare type filters or IPs? I ask because IPs cross borders in a good number of cases. The other reason is that using CloudFlare type filters would allow recaptcha for cases where IPs might be cross-border. Google should see whatever content you're offering to public view if possible, to evaluate their presentation in results. Google understands restricted membership sites. if your schema is accurate (Google does - or did - offer tools to check your schema) it can help.

My comments are a general understanding as I do not personally work with any similar setups. There are others here that might offer more personal experiences using your setup. Patience helps.

[SEO_Maggot]

Thanks @not2easy. The paywall schema was a recommendation I received from Google Webmaster Forum.

So are you easy that i should exclude the paywall schema, or include logic so that it only appears on pages where the viewing is from a restricted location.

I wonder how other sites are handling this. I welcome advise please folks.

thanks.