Does Google really crawl from Russia? And should I care?

Website, Application, Performance Security
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I operate a website, Open990.org, that is almost exclusively of US interest: it makes it easier to read public records concerning tax-exempt corporations. (I know, exciting.) Today I noticed that, according to Cloudflare, over 25% of my requests come from the Russian Federation. This came as news to me, since Google Analytics says it’s way south of 1%.

Undoubtedly, very many of these are attempted attacks. I don’t really care if Yandex can crawl me, so I’m thinking about challenging all Russian traffic.

But then I found some random blog post from 2014 that says Google is crawling from Russia. Obviously, I care a great deal what Google thinks of my site, since almost all our traffic is organic.

Is there any reason not to challenge all Russian traffic, from an SEO standpoint, given my US-specific audience?

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You can challenge Russia and a bunch of other countries with a Firewall Rule while exempting “good bots” like Google.

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Ah! I saw the “known bots” option, but it wasn’t clear to me that it means “bots known to be good.” People also talk about “known criminals,” after all. :slight_smile: Anyway, thanks, I’ll whitelist and see what happens.

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