Does blocking foreign country IP traffic to site, hurt my SEO / US Google rankings?

[bizzer]

I have a website is is only of interest to US visitors.  99% (at least) of Adsense income is from the US.  But I'm getting constant attempts by hackers to login to my admin account.  I have countermeasures fo combat that and am initiating others.

But here's my question: I am considering not allowing any non US, or at least any non-North American, traffic to the site via a Wordpress plugin that does this.  I know it will not affect my business negatively, directly.  However, are there any ramifications of the Google bots of these blocked countries not being able to access my site?  Does it affect the rankings of my site in the US Google searches.

At the very least I could block China, Russia and some eastern European countries.

[Ray-pp]

Honestly, there could be a very real world impact on your SERPs without you understanding it. I suggest not blocking all traffic from foreign countries.

Let's take this scenario as an example:

I have an ecommerce website that only sells to the United States. I really only care about the US traffic, since that is where my sales can come from. However, many of my inbound site links seem to be coming from Outside US traffic. This outside US traffic cannot buy from me, in fact, they cannot buy many of the products I sell because they are not available in their country.

Even so, when investigating my link profile, I notice that some users are getting the products I sell from somewhere and then blogging about how they love the product. They include a link back to my site since they know I sell the product.

Now, it's true that most traffic from that referral source will not convert to paid users. But, the links they provide are helping me in the SERPs, which brings in the qualified traffic that converts to sales.

In regards to the bounce rate =: You're not actually decreasing the bounce rate. Instead, you've identified the accurate segment of users to be measuring bounce rate from. In your Google Analytics, you should filter out the foreign traffic so that you're only measuring the correct segment of traffic that is important to you.

Now you have the best of both worlds - your reports show the accurate target segment and its metrics, as well as, any benefit that comes from the foreign traffic and link building.

[anagentile]

I doubt blocking countries can have any negative effect on your SEO. Like in your case our company's customers are located only in US. We have blocked many foreign countries for exactly the same reasons you name and never had any negative effects on our SEO work due to the IP blocks. It's more...you may actually see a decrease in your website's bounce rates what is supposed to be good for your ranks.

[Ray-pp]

I suggest not to block foreign traffic.

• You do not know why someone might be searching from a foreign country.

• Foreign traffic may help you identify key content areas for optimization, curation, opportunities, ect

• Your site may provide value to foreign visitors in some way that you don't yet understand and removing all traffic could have a negative impact. For example: Foreign visitors cite your content and routinely link back to it (helps you in the SERPs).

If you're seeing many bot attempts on your admin, change its login address. That is a good first measure to preventing brute force attacks.

You can also use a plugin to limit the login attempts. If a bot comes and tries to login it will be prevented from logging in after X attempts.

Use a service like Cloudflare for additional security. Cloudflare is a free CDN provider that will give you an additional layer of security for your site. It has a list of known ip abusers and can filter those out from reaching your website.