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Margaret670

: Over 30% of my web site traffic is mistaken foreign traffic. How can I minimize SEO damage (bounce rates, context, audience relevance)? Despite owning my .com domain name for almost twenty years,

@Margaret670

Posted in: #BounceRate #CountrySpecific #Domains #Traffic #WebHosting

Despite owning my .com domain name for almost twenty years, a new Indian TV show with the same name as my domain is entering its second season, and I can't figure out how to mitigate the damage.

Almost 30% of traffic is coming from India. The primary target market for my business for the last 35 years has primarily been from North America which counts for only 33% of my traffic.

I'm not even sure the full extent of the repercussions. But when I put my business name and India into Google my site came up before I could find the correct site for the TV show.

We are also getting a lot of facebook likes from India, and we are even being left reviews on Facebook with no comments, that are clearly not from ur customers. With only one exception my customers leave me 5 stars, but this show only gets 3 or 4 from its viewers, and it brings my average down.

My site gets really busy when the show airs, slowing down legitimate site traffic.

My host, Cloudways suggested country blocking by .htaccess, but I have learned that would take 6000 lines to block India. I looked into CloudFlare and country blocking is only available on their Enterprise plans, and we are a small family business serving our community under the same name for 35 years.

What affordable solution can I implement to stop or minimize the damage to our site and its perception by Google and Facebook from all this mistaken foreign traffic?

Thanks for all suggestions.

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@Angela700

What I can suggest is to adjust your title tags and meta description tags as well as H1 tags to make user's understand that your site is NOT the TV show.

For example, if your site is a site about building homes and both the TV show and your site is called ABC, then I suggest adding meat to the tags.

So instead of having the title as "ABC" or "ABC inc", make it "ABC house building of america" and change the meta description from "This is ABC" to something like "This is ABC, the #1 american place online for new house building". Even make H1 informative. Instead of the H1 title "Welcome to ABC", use "ABC, the #1 american house building site".

You may also want to specify the lang parameter in the HTML tag to define the language of the site to help crawlers understand it. In my site I use:

<html lang="en">


to denote english language. In your case, "en-us" might be better for American English.

If you do all that, then we can only pray search engines will scan the whole document instead of just the domain name before ranking it.

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