Site design to limit search

[Harry]

Is there any way to limit who see a site to people using computers
located within a relatively narrow geographic area (e.g., city, county)
when they are using the typical search engines?

Harry

 

[Roy Schestowitz]

Is there any way to limit who see a site to people using computers
located within a relatively narrow geographic area (e.g., city, county)
when they are using the typical search engines?

Harry

The very simple answer is no. That question reminds me of "can I prevent
people from saving images that I display to them?".

Even if you asked search engines (and had their consent) to exclude your
site from search queries outside your region, there is the possibility of
using proxies. Needless to say, no decent (in terms of power) search engine
will cater for your needs so my last sentence is a very hypothetical one.

If you have a local and humble search engine (I have heard of such SE's
targetting a small community of sites only) that only crawls local sites,
then you can add exclusion rules to your /robots.txt file which only allow
that one search engine to use up bandwidth.

Hope it helps,

Roy

 

[Adrienne]

Is there any way to limit who see a site to people using computers
located within a relatively narrow geographic area (e.g., city, county)
when they are using the typical search engines?

Harry

In addition to what Roy said, you would really not want to do this because
someone might be using another computer in another city, but want
information local to them.

You could have the user search on zipcode or postal code, and then only
show results for that zip code, or within a certain mile radius.

 

[casteele95thbgheavy]

Roy and Adrienne:

I wanted to do some "test marketing" of a product in this local area
and prevent -- at the same time -- possible competitors in other areas
of the country from learning about it. So ... it sounds like that isn't
possible.

Drat! But thank you both for taking the time to respond to my question.
I do appreciate it.

Harry Truman