Blocking Countries rules can hurt SEO?

Hi there,

2 years ago I had to block a couple of sites in some countries due to regulations in those countries.

And during this time those sites lost traffic.

I always thought that could have something to do with SEO, backlinks, content, etc.

But a couple of weeks ago, in an SEO group I am, a guy posted some information that I would like to get confirmed.

He said that he had tested the blocking rules from Cloudlare and lost organic traffic since he had lost kws on the Google rank.

After a while, he deleted those blocking rules and the site recovered.

Does anyone had tested this?