SEO Implications of firewalls that block "foreign connections"

[SimpleSearch]

Hello!

A client's IT security team has firewalls on the site with GEO blocking enabled. This is to prevent foreign connections to applications as part of a contractual agreements with their own clients.

Does anyone have any experience with workarounds for this?

Thank you!

[SimpleSearch]

Thank you SO much!

[effectdigital]

I guess that if Google decides to crawl your site using one of their data-centers from one of the blocked regions, suddenly Google will believe that your whole site has gone down and become inaccessible (as Google rarely launches crawls from multiple multi-regional data centers, for one website - simultaneously)

**Exempting GoogleBot via user-agent would be the only possible work-around **(that I know of) If those trying to access your site (whom you are trying to block out) became aware of this modification, they could alter their scripts, browsers and tools to send you the GoogleBot user-agent (thus penetrating your firewall pretty easily)

In the end, you just have to decide what's more important to you

It might be possible to identify Google's data-centre IP addresses from server logs and exempt those instead of exempting their user-agent, but that would probably need a full time employee just to keep up with all the changes. You can be sure that Google won't make it easy to identify their data centers via IP data