Can search engines penalize my site if I block IPs from some countries?

[Xopie]

I have spotted that some countries in South America generate lot's of traffic on my site and  I don't want to sell my service there. Can I be penalized for blocking IPs from certain counties?

Thanks!

[Marcus_Miller]

Nope, you are not targeting that region and you don't care about localised results in south america so don't worry about it. The search engine would never know as long as you don't block one of their crawlers anyhow so... block away.