Geotarget all countries except one

Question

Hi, we have a website that offers licenses online. I hope this is the right forum for this kind of questions.

We have business partners targeting the US market, and we are responsible for all of the rest of the world. We are not allowed to offer licenses to visitors from the US.

We therefore want to target all countries with the exception of the US.

The main source of visitors is Google organic search.

Our server is hosted in the US.

The domain is a .com-domain.

We have set the "Geographic target" in Google Webmasters tools to be "United Kingdom". Does this btw. cost us potential search traffic visitors coming from other countries than the UK?

Most visitors still unfortunately come from the US.

How can we target the world except for the US?

I assume blocking all of the US would be inconvenient, particularly since the Googlebot is coming from US IP numbers.

Thanks

Answer 1

I don't think Geotargeting is a good idea for this at all.

This has many pitfalls - as you say already, you may block search engine robots. Also, what about users using U.S. proxies, users visiting the U.S., people using an american ISP...

Why not simply offer a link "U.S. customers please click here" and/or prohibit users from entering a U.S. address in the ordering process?