Blocking certain countries via IP address location

[MNKid15]

We are a US based company that ships only to US and Canada. We've had two issues arise recently from foreign countries (Russia namely) that caused us to block access to our site from anyone attempting to interact with our store from outside of the US and Canada.

1. The first issue we encountered were fraudulent orders originating from Russia (using stolen card data) and then shipping to a US based International shipping aggregator.

2. The second issue was a consistent flow of Russian based "new customer" entries.

My question to the MOZ community is this: are their any unintended consequences, from an SEO perspective, to blocking the viewing of our store from certain countries.

[Mobilio]

Blocking IPs on geolocation can be dangerous. But you can use MaxMind GeoIP database:
https://github.com/maxmind/geoip-api-php
or you also can implemente GeoIP in "add to cart" or "new user" as additional check. So when user is outside of US/CA you can require them to fill captcha or just ignore their requests.

Now from bot point of view - if bot visit with US IP and with UK (example) IP they will see same pages. Just within UK they can't create new user or adding to cart. HTML code will be 100% same.

PS: I forgot... VPN or Proxies are cheap these days. I have few EC2 instances with everything just for mine own needs. Bad Guys also can use them so think twice about possible "protection". Note the quotes.

[seoman10]

Fully agree with Peter, very easy to bypass IP blocking these days, there are some sophisticated systems that can still detect but mostly outside the range of us mere mortals!

If you block a particular country from crawling your website it is pretty certain you will not rank in that country (which I guess isn't a problem anyway) but I suspect this would only have a very limited (if any) impact on your rankings in other countries.

We have had a similar issue, here are a couple of ideas.

1. When someone places an order use a secondary method of validation.

2. With the new customer entries/registrations make sure you have a good captcha, most of this sort of thing tends to be from bots. A captcha Will often fix that problem.

[gfiorelli1]

Both answers above are correct and great ones.

From a strategical point of view, formally blocking russian IPs does not have any SEO effect in your case, because - as a business - you don't even need an SEO strategy for the Russian market.