Advise on the right way to block country specific users but not block Googlebot - and not be seen to be cloaking. Help please!
-
Hi,
I am working on the SEO of an online gaming platform - a platform that can only be accessed by people in certain countries, where the games and content are legally allowed.
Example: The games are not allowed in the USA, but they are allowed in Canada.Present Situation:
Presently when a user from the USA visits the site they get directed to a restricted location page with the following message:RESTRICTED LOCATION
Due to licensing restrictions, we can't currently offer our services in your location. We're working hard to expand our reach, so stay tuned for updates!Because USA visitors are blocked Google which primarily (but not always) crawls from the USA is also blocked, so the company webpages are not being crawled and indexed.
Objective / What we want to achieve:
The website will have multiple region and language locations. Some of these will exist as standalone websites and others will exist as folders on the domain. Examples below:
domain.com/en-ca [English Canada]
domain.com/fr-ca [french Canada]
domain.com/es-mx [spanish mexico]
domain.com/pt-br [portugese brazil]
domain.co.in/hi [hindi India]If a user from USA or another restricted location tries to access our site they should not have access but should get a restricted access message.
However we still want google to be able to access, crawl and index our pages.Can i suggest how do we do this without getting done for cloaking etc?
Would this approach be ok? (please see below)
We continue to work as the present situation is presently doing, showing visitors from the USA a restricted message.
However rather than redirecting these visitors to a restricted location page, we just black out the page and show them a floating message as if it were a model window.
While Googlebot would be allowed to visit and crawl the website.I have also read that it would be good to put paywall schema on each webpage to let Google know that we are not cloaking and its a restricted paid page. All public pages are accessible but only if the visitor is from a location that is not restricted
Any feedback and direction that can be given would be greatly appreciated as i am new to this angle of SEO.
Sincere thanks,
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
-
SiteName Attribute Showing in Different Language in SERP
We are currently experiencing issues with our subdomain SiteName. Our parent company root domain is a Japanese language site, but we have an English subdomain that is for the United States primarily, and nearly rest of world for organic traffic. Our issue is that we have followed the guidelines here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/site-names There was a large post on here with many responses including Googlers with issues others were having, but it has since been removed. Here is the code in place on our homepage: <script
Technical SEO | | Evan_Wright
type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "WebSite",
"name": "Mescius Developer Tools",
"alternateName": ["Mescius, inc.", "developer.mescius.com"],
"url": "https://developer.mescius.com" }
</script> Unfortunately this is what is appearing in the SERP. It is using the Japanese equivalent of our parent company. Screenshot 2024-02-23 at 3.37.55 PM.png Even though the relationship between root and subdomain should not be causing this, it seems like something is impacting this incorrect SiteName, and it is impacting CTR for the subdomain. Has anyone else experienced this and found a fix?0 -
Moving from single domain to multiple CCTLDs
Hi, I have a website targeting 3 markets (and therefor 3 languages). I was currently using a single domain with each market being targeted in the following format: www.website.com/pl
International SEO | | cellydy
www.website.com/de
www.website.com/hu It's clear to me by looking at organic results, that in my industry (Real Estate) Google is putting a large emphasis on local businesses and local domains. Top 10 organic results for all my keywords in all markets have country specific CCTLDs. I decided to migrate from a single domain strategy to a multi domain strategy. I own the domains. The new structure is www.website.com/pl -> www.website.pl
www.website.com/de -> www.website.de
www.website.com/hu -> www.website.hu All the website have been added to google search console and 301 redirects are in place and working correctly. The pages are all interlinked and have rel=alternate to each other. The sitemaps are all done correctly. My question is how do I tell Google about this. The change of address feature only works for changing one domain to one other domain. It's been a week and the old www.website.com domain is still showing up (even considering 301 redirects). Or do I just need to be patient and wait it out? Any tips?0 -
Unsolved Crawling only the Home of my website
Hello,
Product Support | | Azurius
I don't understand why MOZ crawl only the homepage of our webiste https://www.modelos-de-curriculum.com We add the website correctly, and we asked for crawling all the pages. But the tool find only the homepage. Why? We are testing the tool before to suscribe. But we need to be sure that the tool is working for our website. If you can please help us.0 -
Ecom: Hreflang start working - anything I can do about SERP currencies?
Hello everyone, Finally, after moving our hreflang tags from our sitemap to our header HTML, Google seems to start displaying the correct URLs in the SERPs. From what I can see - Google folds URLs, so instead of indexing all pages, it only selects an English version of our site but displays a different URL based on our hreflang tags (not sure if that's good or bad or if I should work towards a full indexation). However - I am now facing the issue that the wrong currency will often be displayed in my SERPs. E.g. in Australia I may have Euros or in Canada we see British Pounds (i.e. /en-ca/* URL shows in SERPs but the /en-gb/* URL is actually indexed). Is there any way around this? I was searching for a solution and found some but seems like most don't exist anymore (https://moz.com/community/q/topic/53216/international-seo-ecommerce-rich-snippets/3) at least if I try and dig deeper into the source. What's the current recommendation?
International SEO | | sriffs0 -
Getting accurate Geo Location traffic stats in Google Analytics - HELP
One of our clients services the US and the UK, but having looked at the report over an extended period of time we can still see that the vast majority of traffic is coming from the US. I.e. our last report for March indicated that there were over 3,000 users in the US but only 6 in the UK. We know that Google Analytics works out a user’s location based on where their IP is located and not their physical location, and that this means that the data needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as it won’t always represent what you expect. That being said, we know that the traffic figures for Europe are largely inaccurate and would like to get some more accurate stats to report on. Is there a way to do so at all within Google Analytics?
International SEO | | Wagada1 -
What is the proper way to setup hreflang tags on my English and Spanish site?
I have a full English website at http://www.example.com and I have a Spanish version of the website at http://spanish.example.com but only about half of the English pages were translated and exist on the Spanish site. Should I just add a sitemap to both sites with hreflang tags that point to the correct version of the page? Is this a proper way to set this up? I was going to repeat this same process for all of the applicable URLs that exist on both versions of the website (English and Spanish). Is it okay to have hreflang="es" or do I need to have a country code attached as well? There are many Spanish speaking countries and I don't know if I need to list them all out. For example hreflang="es-bo" (Bolivia), hreflang="es-cl" (Chile), hreflang="es-co" (Columbia), etc... Sitemap example for English website URL:
International SEO | | peteboyd
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/</loc></url> Sitemap example for Spanish website URL:
<url><loc>http://spanish.example.com/</loc></url> Thanks in advance for your feedback and help!0 -
Rel Canonical or Rel Alternate advice please
Hi All, I was hoping to just get some advice on my situation as to the right markup to use for our situation, We are working on a more user/mobile friendly redesign for our website and are hoping to release it soon, Our primary URL is www.cirrusresearch.co.uk as we are a UK based company, This has stayed as our primary international website for historical and political reasons as we still get good traffic from overseas, the .co.uk doesn't really seem to hold us back internationally, However underlying we do have the www.cirrusresearch.com pointed all of our pages, which is not a general redirect but is giving us a duplicate of each of our pages but with the .com extension, we basically have an exact duplication of our .co.uk website but with the .com extension, we are not looking to switch to the .com as a primary domain, I have noticed when doing some USA ranking research that Google is preferring to display the alternate .com versions of each page (Understandably) We have not noticeably been penalized by Google for being a duplicate. I took a look at the documentation on the webmaster support on the use of REL Canonical and REL Alternate and am unsure which of these would be most suited markup for my crazy situation, Any advice on this please? Thanks,James
International SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Location Specific Reporting
Hi, We run a site which has slightly different versions targeted to different countries/ language groups and have just recently re-launched the site for two of the locations we currently target. Is there any way of specifically restricting SEOMoz reporting to a particular section of the site (perhaps based on URL structure) so that we can investigate the performance of the new sites without interference from the old sites? Thanks!
International SEO | | sgraceware1