Should we block all foreign traffic?

[Guava]

Originally posted by Xander

Well, I wouldn't call that blocking foreign traffic, but targeting your ads.

But a lot of sites have hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages listed in Google for FREE and receive the majority of their traffic from these listings.
Buying traffic via ads gives you certain privileges, IMHO free search engine listings don't.

Well given that then why don't I target my incoming traffic. So us, uk and ca traffic would be routed to a page that is targetted towards them. This would be a page with content and ads that I can get paid for. Then I target the remaining traffic to a different page with my big ol' allclicks link and that gets to be their targetted content. (don't think allclicks would pay for this traffic either but it's just an example)

I target content and ads based on geographic regions. Content does not need to be the same for both domestic and foriegn traffic. Makes sense to me.

Personally, I no longer own any sites that depend on ads for revenue so I don't mind foreign traffic. (they have Visa and mastercard cards too!)

[Xander]

Originally posted by Guava
... I target content and ads based on geographic regions. Content does not need to be the same for both domestic and foriegn traffic. Makes sense to me
....

The problem is that the pages targetted on US/UK visitors would still come up in international users' search results.
The pages of content they get returned in their search results are not accessible to them, which makes these listings irrelevant for their search.
Ok, they would be routed to a page where they get to see the allclicks link, but I bet that's not what they where searching for.
It's this danger of irrelevant search results that would worry search engines IMHO.

If the content would be identical and only the ads would be different then there's no problem at all, but I understand it's very hard for a lot of webmasters to even get any ad-inventory targetted on foreign traffic.