Block access to site from everywhere but north america

[Atomicx]

I have a site that is being attacked very hard by bots, malware, etc. Most of it seems to be originating from Asia and Eastern Europe so I want to block off access to the site to everybody but people in North America. We do not ship out of the country anyways so it really does not need to be seen by people around the world.

How can I set this up?

[Carloseo]

Hi Noah,

Excluding the whole world would be a drastic solution, I know the spam is a bad issue, but you could be missing real traffic even if you are a local website, and even if you don't, you will still be getting spam coming from USA and there is quite some. I recommend you to try other solution a filter based on your hostnames.

This solution requires a little more time to set up, but it has 3 huge advantages, and you won't have to exclude all the world except USA.

• You will stop the spam before it hits you, adding a filter for the referral after you see it will stop it, but by the time you apply it you will have already hits of the spam.
• You will need only ONE filter to stop all ghost spam, instead of creating various sets of filters.
• Lately, some of the spammers(e.g. free-social-buttons) have been hitting GA accounts with fake direct visits along with the referral, the filter for the referral won’t stop the direct visit, on the other hand. The Valid hostname filter will stop ALL ghost spam in any form whether it shows as a referral, keyword or direct visit.

This is what I've been using on my accounts for the last moths and I haven't received a single hit of ghost spam. You can find more information of how this filter works and a detailed guide to set it up in this article.

http://www.ohow.co/what-is-referrer-spam-how-stop-it-guide/

If you are not convinced and still want to exclude all countries you can follow the same guide for the valid hostname on the article and just change the filter field for Country and put United States in the filter pattern

Hope it helps,

[Atomicx]

It is drastic but it's needed/ We do not ship anywhere outside of the continent so there really is no need for traffic from Russia.

I want an easy solution that I an put in the robots.txt file or something

[Carloseo]

Then you can follow the last part of my previous answer. Which are the spammers that you are seeing? If it's ghost spam like 4webmasters, free-social-buttons, then the only way to stop them is with filters in google analytics

[CandymanKen]

Hi-

We had a similar situation which got even worse when someone initiated a DDOS attack on our site from out of the country. Since then we have used cloudflare.com and things have been a lot better.

Good Luck

Ken

[Atomicx]

It is people that are duplicating our website, hacking other servers, then uploading our modified malware filled site to these servers.

I do not care about fake referral traffic. I just need to totally 100% block traffic from Russia. I do not want them to even see the site.

[CandymanKen]

That is exactly the problem we had. Cloudflare helped with that as well as blocking  the ips with our old webhost.

Also, make sure that you disavow the links from those domains in webmaster tools as well.

Good luck

Ken

[Atomicx]

I do not see that function in the free version of cloud flare? I am adding the "challenge" rule to hopefully cut back. My client does not have the money for the paid plans.

My next step is to go disavow those links.