tedster - 8:49 pm on Jan 27, 2011 (gmt 0)

I was talking with a friend earlier this week about Google Suggestions. He monitors Suggestions very closely for a lot of words, and he has seen a significant shift this month. The big change: Google Suggestions now appear to be quite "hyper-local", varying even over small geographic differences. This variation is not only for obviously local query terms like [pizza] or [hardware store].

Such a shift could very well be a factor that affects traffic, most especially the geographic source of traffic. It's also an indicator that Google continues to generate ever finer granularity in their search results. And if they get something wrong in their understanding of geography - whether in Suggestions or the actual SERP, well, "zombie traffic" could be one result, I suppose.