Ban Countries We Don't Need Traffic From?

Reduce our exposure to hackers.

[dandridge]

We are a small ecommerce site serving North America. Since the major search engines that crawl and index our site have their data centers in North America, and our customers are in North America (we don't ship internationally), does it make sense to block access from Russia, Eastern Europe, China and the like? In studying our server logs, I see a considerable amount of bandwidth usage from Yandex and Baiduspider (supposedly legitimate search engines from Russia and China that don't obey robots.txt). I see a lot of discussion about trying to stop these two from crawling, and someone suggested blocking the country if your site has no benefit there. Is this good advice? If so, would it be a good idea to block all but North America?

Thank you.

Jim

[lammert]

Hi Jim, first of all Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Blocking traffic from countries where you don't have customers and are not planning to ship to makes sense. Many websites are doing that kind of blocking.

You may however loose some customers if you restrict your site to only a small region. As an example, I am partly living in Europe and partly in Asia. In the months I'm in Asia I often buy goods via the Internet and let them deliver to my European address. Some websites restrict access or decline payments from an Asian IP address, even if all the buyer information is from a region they normally serve. Because of this I have stopped using a few webshops and service providers.

The best thing you can do is to study your traffic logs to see if you had any legitimate sales coming from foreign IP addresses but with buyer information in the region you serve. If that is the case, you might loose some business if you restrict access to your site to a small region.

[theentry]

Hm lammert got a good point there, but in your case I would just put a poll on your site also would send out mails to returning customers if they will mind if the non-supported countries will be blocked from accessing your site..

[enigma1]

If so, would it be a good idea to block all but North America?

You can't reliably block them with the number of colocation servers, proxies and man in the middle methods. You can block the popular foreign spiders though, when directly access your site.

But if you're concern with the b/w then you can optimize the application in terms of resources. Also dedicated servers have usually firewalls to protect against attacks and resource waste.

So for e-commerce sites unless I get to a point to see a loss in sales because of unwanted traffic, I wouldn't do permanent IP blocking. There are lightweight methods like checking headers on requests and bounce them, more effective to reduce junk traffic.