Blocking Certain Countries (India and Russia) From Viewing and Spamming My Website
January 8th, 2009
Recently my beloved website traffic tracking company, Web-Stat, announced a new feature: Geo-Targeting. This nifty feature enables your website to automatically detect a visitor’s location and do neat things like showing a particular banner ad or other location-specific content. It also allows website owners to block all kinds of traffic to their websites by country, state, zipcode…and many other things. I thought, hmmm, why would someone want to block traffic? The answer: Spam Prevention!
There are two criteria that you should meet before you think about doing this. First, your business should have a defined region. There may be certain countries that you are 100% sure you don’t have clients in, or maybe don’t want clients in. Secondly, you get lots of spam from those same certain countries.
I meet both of these criteria. The vast majority of my clients are in North America. I’ve got one in Latin America, one in the UAE, had one in France…but in general, they’re in North America. And I routinely get lots of spam from two countries in particular: India and Russia. Spam costs me money because it takes me time to read and delete messages from these folks, and it’s also just plain annoying.
Take this example of an email I got yesterday afternoon from “Abubakar” with an email address of “abu@cattechnologies.com”:
“Hello,I have visited your web site but i found some of drawbacks i.e: 1)your website has low Back links. 2)your keyword rankings are very low. If you assist me to introduce our SEO services.Ihope you get more sales for your current website. I will be waiting for your reply… Thanks & Regards, Abu.”
First off, I hate spam. And I detest spam that actually tries to frighten me or actually insults me in order to get my business. I’ve worked very hard on my own website’s search engine rankings, and this particular spam just sent me over the top. When I looked in my Web-Stat account, sure enough, the person who filled out my contact form was from India. And then I remembered seeing the Web-Stat notice that they had a new Geo Targeting feature!
Now, I get spam from India and Russia all the time. In fact, if you look at my website statistics, 3% of my website traffic comes from India. And I get solicitations several times a week asking me to outsource my work to India, join in a back-linking scam, give them SEO work, etc. The only people who call me on the phone, asking me to outsource, are people from India. I confess I’ve been annoyed by this incessant badgering -Â all from people in one particular country.
Russian folks seem to love to spam my blog. I don’t know why. But they just do. Most of the time Akismet catches the spam, but some get through. They have all these funky Russian characters in the comments. Again, I have to read them, and delete them, wasting my time.
I did a bit of quick research and learned that Russia was the third worst spammer country behind the US and China. Looking at the Click Fraud Index by Click Forensics, Russia also scores quite high, with India being medium. TrendMicro.com has Russia at #2 and India at #7 for worst spamming countries. So my personal experiences aren’t that much out of line with what’s going on out there in spammers and fraud world.
So today, I’ve decided to take Web-Stat up on it’s offer and block my countries of choice: India and Russia. Sure I’ll give up some of my traffic, and also give up the possibility of having a Indian or Russian client, but I think it’ a good trade-off to make to avoid the wasted time and aggravation. I’ll let you know how it goes!
Jill--------------
J. Olkoski
Aldebaran Web Design, Seattle
Jill Olkoski has a BS in Engineering, a BS in Computer Science and an MA in Clinical Psychology. She delights in using her advanced technical, psychological and interpersonal skills to help small business owners develop cost-effective and successful websites.
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January 28th, 2009 at 9:30 am
This is *awesome*. I just blocked all non-US countries from my forum. There are bits of my website I want everybody to be able to see, but the forum is a spam-factory, so that had to be limited.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:42 am
UPDATE: This is working perfectly - the spam on my blog has gone way, way down and my solicitations for outsourcing have also gone almost to zero. This is a absolutely fantastic feature that I now can’t live without!
May 3rd, 2009 at 6:18 am
My website has been shut down because of an unintentional trade mark infringement owned by some company in New Zealand,
the words “Master Plumber” cannot be used in New Zealand, (who’s whole country only visited my site 30 times in the last 30 days) But because my website is named master plumber, they had my site shut down, I beleive If I could block New Zealand from viewing my website I would no longer be infringing on the trade mark and can go back to doing business. can you please tell me how to get this feature you mentioned. Thank you.
tom@masterplumber.net
May 3rd, 2009 at 11:53 am
Hi Tom,
I guess I don’t understand how a company in another country can “shut down” your website due to alleged trademark infringement. Likewise, if a website is “shut down” and this status is beyond your control - blocking traffic seems to be a moot point. Regardless, to block a country from viewing your website you should modify your .htaccess file (lots of free advice out there on how to do this - solutions vary by your particular hosting situation, which is why I’m not posting how I do this here). This post is about using Web-Stat to help block countries - which uses Javascript, a different method.
May 3rd, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Yes it is hard to believe, New Zealand was able to have my website shut down. I simply moved it to another server (the server made the dissension with out contacting me) any way I have been in contact with web-stat and I think I can Just Block New Zealand from viewing my site. then there will be no trademark infringement.
Thank you for your help
May 3rd, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Hi Tomas,
One thing to mention, is that since Web-Stat uses Javascript, there may still be visitors who slip through. I’ve seen this on occasion. If you look in Web-Stat and see that people are still coming from New Zealand - you may have to utilize the .htaccess solution and block all IP addresses in New Zealand.
May 3rd, 2009 at 12:08 pm
OH NO I have the list of IP addresses it is about 950 Imp Addresses and I’m on a windows server. I don’t think I can use .htaccess on a windows server.
May 3rd, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Hmmm, I have no idea. The hosting companies I usually deal with are always on Linux and Unix. I hope you can figure something out. Maybe switch to a different hosting company?
May 3rd, 2009 at 12:52 pm
I will work it out one way or another, Thank you
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:59 am
Hi Jill. I’m glad I’ve found this post, as I have had it up to here with the daily barrage of spam from Indian SEO and web design firms. Like yourself, the ONLY unsolicited email and calls I get are from these firms in India, and as with your business, some days my site gets more hits from India than my own country. I’m absolutely fed up with having every work day interrupted multiple times by this garbage and I need to put a stop to it one way or the other.
I see that you wrote this post in January, so I’m curious as to how the service has worked for you in the long run. Is it worth investing in?
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:45 am
Hi Heather,
While a few do slip through (presumably since they have Javascript turned off), the vast majority, I’d say like 95% are blocked. I don’t think I’ve got a single phone call to outsource my work since I’ve activated the Web-Stat blocker. The other thing I do, is that if I notice someone slipped through (via Web-Stat) I will add that IP address to my .htaccess file. But this happens only once a week or two. Used to get maybe 5-10 hits a day, so this is a large reduction. In fact, every time I get a spam or solicitation from a country that’s non US, I block it via Web-Stat. The amount of aggravation has gone way down, I love it. Web-Stat does have a 30 day free trial, so you could give it a run. Since it works immediately, I’d imagine after a month you could tell. Understand the primary reason I have Web-Stat is to analyze my traffic, the blocking capability is just a lovely feature they added.