Geotarget all countries except one

Question

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?

Answer 2

i'm reading this geotargeting in webmaster tool and imho there is several pro and cons around. the pro would be if you targeting local market and only local market can reach your product then this option would be valid and i think you will have faster indexing for local market.

the cons would be low on non-domestic visitors from organic search result.

but if you do targeting international visitors then using gTLDs would be a good idea. this way the crawler would know which page for which country (read: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192)

but i can't quite sure whether when you specifying for geotarget for specific country, does that mean your page won't come up in SERP for other country? if this true then there is a low use for geotargeting. probably example below can be more enlighting:

if i were to specify geotargeting for my website to Spain market only in webmaster tool i'm worried that Spanish around the world can not find my website because they are not living in Spain.

anyway all i'm saying that this feature can be a great advantage for selling product online locally.