u/lamiamiatl

Is blocking countries using Cloudflare or geo-plugin bad for SEO? 99% of the customers are in the U.S. and Europe. Other countries fill up my email list, customer support with questions, etc., and some are bad with credit card fraud. But I'm wondering if this is bad for SEO (bounce rate, time on page, etc.) Wondering if I should unblock everything, especially now with AI overviews. Thoughts?

Google has said they penalize "over-optimized" SEO. On my site, I have a bunch of internal links on each page, mostly "Also See" articles in a large list, along with "Most Popular" posts in a large list. Can some of you share what tests you've tested and noticed an improvement? Wondering if I should remove these lists of internal links? I feel they help users, but Google may see them differently. Just confused on what "over-optimized" means exactly.