Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down.
They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service.
Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate.
Thanks
-
You can add a couple of signals such as meta language tag globally
and also in the footer make sure you have your address listed globally on the site, UK, United Kingdom, Great Britain, whatever variations you can include are all hints to Google as to where your business is.
Also, I agree with Robert, worry about the behavior of your qualified regional traffic and not cutting off traffic from other regions just because of bounce rate and time on site. I'd personally prefer the traffic and visibility.
-
Andrew,
I can understand that you are concerned re the bounce rate, but you are likely over-concerned where you do not need to be. The reason is no site is losing ranking to bounce rate. Yes, there is a very low amount of debate on this, but I do not see it in the day to day and I look over a lot of sites. First, with your WMT settings as you have them, Google knows where your market is.
So, to help you feel better, do this: Take a look at your non UK traffic. Is the high bounce rate coming from there? If so and if the algorithm takes it into account (it does not), then the algorithm also takes into account the bounce is from other than your proclaimed market. (The increase in BR).
Worry about your traffic in the UK - is it up or down? Is your time on site increasing or decreasing? How many page views are you getting over time? Have you gotten your content to a place where it is not the same descriptions and images as others selling the same furniture? Then, or before, how are you converting? Are your sales good? Increasing? Decreasing?
Last question is this. Assume for whatever reason, that a crazy Yank goes to your site and sees a lovely divan he wishes to purchase and is willing to pay $1,000 to ship it to Texas... Would you let him?
Best to you,
Robert
-
if the problem is that those visitors from abroad are making your analytics data less valid, try to make a filtered profile where only visitors from the UK are included.
But unfortunately, there is no "local type" robots.txt where you can block specific countries. you could ban certain IP ranges from accessing your site but i wouldn't recommend that...
-
Hi Philipp,
Thanks for your response. As I said already I have put UK as my target in WMT (web master tools).
The problem is that as soon as you arrive on my site it is pretty clearly UK only - and it is a furniture site, so who in their right mind would try to buy a 3 door wardrobe from over 1,000 miles away! hence they leave almost immediately and my bounce is going up.
-
Nope, you can't. But you can go to Webmaster Tools > Settings and set your geolocation to the UK. This won't stop your page being indexed in other countries, but might probably put the emphasis on UK results.
But I don't see what the problem is with ranking abroad. In general, it doesn't hurt to get traffic, even if it's non-converting. Or do you get too many requests that won't lead to sales?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does Page speed matter for google ranking?
We are not sure that page does matter or not for google ranking as I am working for this keyword "flower delivery in Bangalore" from last few months and I saw some website's google first page who have low page speed but still ranking so I am really worried about my page that has also low page speed. will my Bangalore page rank on google the first page if the speed is low and kindly suggest me more tips for the ranking best factors which really works in 2020 and one more thing that domain authority really matters in this year? as I also saw some websites with low domain authority and ranking on google's first page. Home page: Flowerportal Bangalore page: https://flowerportal.in/flower-delivery/bangalore/ focus Keyword is: Flower delivery in Bangalore, send flowers to Bangalore
Technical SEO | | vidi34231 -
Will Google crawl and rank our ReactJS website content?
We have 250+ products dynamically inserted and sorted on our site daily (more specifically our homepage... yes, it's a long page). Our dev team would like to explore rendering the page server-side using ReactJS. We currently use a CDN to cache all the content, which of course we would like to continue using. SO... will Google be able to crawl that content? We've read some articles with different ideas (including prerendering): http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
Technical SEO | | Jane.com
http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-big-day-at-google/ If we were to only load the schema important to the page (like product title, image, price, description, etc.) from the server and then let the client render the remaining content (comments, suggested products, etc.), would that go against best practices? It seems like that might be seen as showing the googlebot 1 version and showing the site visitor a different (more complete) version.0 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
How to stop google from indexing specific sections of a page?
I'm currently trying to find a way to stop googlebot from indexing specific areas of a page, long ago Yahoo search created this tag class=”robots-nocontent” and I'm trying to see if there is a similar manner for google or if they have adopted the same tag? Any help would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Iamfaramon0 -
How to fix Google index after fixing site infected with malware.
Hi All Upgraded a Joomla site for a customer a couple of months ago that was infected with malware (it wasn't flagged as infected by google). Site is fine now but still noticing search queries for "cheap adobe" etc with links to http://domain.com/index.php?vc=201&Cheap_Adobe_Acrobat_xi in web master tools (about 50 in total). These url's redirect back to home page and seem to be remaining in the index (I think Joomla is doing this automatically) Firstly, what sort of effect would these be having on on their rankings? Would they be seen by google as duplicate content for the homepage (moz doesn't report them as such as there are no internal links). Secondly what's my best plan of attack to fix them. Should I setup 404's for them and then submit them to google? Will resubmitting the site to the index fix things? Would appreciate any advice or suggestions on the ramifications of this and how I should fix it. Regards, Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
Bing rank drop off for multiple sites
Hi Mozzers, Seeing some wacky stuff going on on some sites I manage. In more than a few, the ranking on bing has dropped basically overnight from page one spots to not being found on the first 100 positions. Anyone else seeing similar results? Some of the sites are fairly new, some have been around for ages, some are wordpress, some are not. I've been searching for some news of a big change on bing, but keep reading about bing dropping the thin sites during black friday. In one example, I had the site set up in BWT for a while, and had a look at the data. The reports show that the pages are crawled, the index summary shows pages indexed, and there seems to be no crawl errors, but rankings are absolutely gone. Also, I can't see the sites in bing if I search "site:example.com" in bing. Here's 2 examples, the first would make sense since it's pretty thin as I havent added much content yet: http://homewindowtint.org but this one doesn't make sense to me. Sure there's a few errors, but to be dropped like a rock seems weird http://www.ahmedandsukaram.com
Technical SEO | | rosstaylor0 -
How long will Google take to stop crawling an old URL once it has been 301 redirected
I need to do a clean-up old urls that have been redirected in sitemap and was wondering about this.
Technical SEO | | Ant-8080 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0