Different ranking according to country - some down 60 positions

[Smark]

My site ranked in top 10 in December for the keywords I targeted.
Two weeks ago I noticed much lower traffic to my site for the USA IP range. I did some research and I found that the site ranked only #60+ on the USA Google data centers.
It still ranked in top 10 in all other countries arround the world for the same serch terms.
One week ago the site ranked again in top 10 for the USA visitors. It lasted for 3 days and then it dropped again to #60+ only in the USA.
It still ranks in top 10 for the same terms in all other countries.

This problem appeared only 2 weeks ago and affected not only my site but also several sites in top 10 for the same keywords. These sites also lost their top positions for the USA data centers.

How can you explain this behavior of Google data centers?
May there be any database problems on American data centers that Google still haven't noticed?
Can I do anything to improve the situation?

[sudden]

I keep seeing strange things happening on google germany - sites that are correctly asscociated to Germany show up on every google domain - EXCEPT on google Germany. Ahh that makes sense..

From my site of the globe, geo targeting worked flawless for the last year. And now this complete nonsense? As the say, don't fix it, if it aint broken.

[justinatpixeltierra]

ahhh so google germany is as confused as google espana. I wish there was some NEW code to lure the robots (More than the zillion things with have to embed or do) like a piece of 01010101 cheese. Well I have found out that the geographical googles per country like .de.es.ru etc are getting far more localized than the standard ENGLISH .co.uk and .co.za aus and .US google HQ. So we are all going to have to master many languages in SEO. But the german one is the other way round you say. ?

[pxc433]

Yes me too.

Our site has been around for ages, and our home market is the UK although we sell in Australia and NZ. It's a .com site, hosted in the UK with a UK IP address.

Customers searching in the US, India, and other important markets but with which we have little connection, see us on page 1 (and very high up there as well). Our home market, the UK, sees us on Page 2 for almost everything, and a bunch of small spammy sites above.

I know the situation in the US by searching through a US proxy on google.com.

As a result, I've seen a dramatic increase in enquiries from the US, Brazil, India, Africa and a drop to almost nothing from the UK.

Geo-targetting seemed to work well before, now it's gone beserk.

[sudden]

I'm afraid, currently geo location does not work correctly and there is little we can do but wait for Google to fix it. :(

[Coppercavanders]

We were on # 1 on our main keywords widgets for years on Google.com. Then suddenly around 27th Jan, we dropped like a stone and currently we are on the 5th page of Google.

The PR is intact, the backlinks are fine and so are the pages. Everything is just as before except this drop.

Has anybody else experienced the same especially during the last fortnight.

Does any post have details on this drop.

Please help.

Cheers.

Coppercavanders

[newsphinx]

Here I have a site with 9 years and have been ranked top 10 for several keywords. From Jan. 2008, I found the search results are dissimilar from different countries.

For example, KeywordA ranked 2 in 2007, now ranked 120 in US, and ranked 20-30 for other countries (UK. CA. AU...). When querying from the DataCenters(I checked over 40 DCs) directly, always shows 12.

While for my another KeywordB ranked 5 in 2007, now ranked 6 in US, and ranked 5 for other countries. DataCenters show 2.

My questions are:

. Is there any penalties or country filter applied to my site? If there's a penalty, why does KwywordA ranked much higher in the countries outside US? (I think any panelty will affect the DCs' resuls directly, is that right?)

. Can Google distinguish the region of my site visitors and apply some algo to the search result? (I guess G may collect visitors info by the IP, the backlink's site IP, even the AdSense click IP)

. What's the factor(s) cause the difference between SERs from DCs and Google.com?

--NewSphinx

[edited by: tedster at 8:54 am (utc) on Feb. 21, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[Smark]

Two monts passed since my site dropped in SERPs on google.com for US visitors.
I removed all geo-targeted keywords about 1.5 moths ago. I also added some US geo keywords. The site was fully recrewled by G since then!
But it's still nowhere in US SERPs for my main two word keyphrases.
For example it's not in top 150 in the US for some of my keyphrases while it's in top 10 in the rest of the world for the same keyphrases. For some other keywords it's in top 50 in the US and still top 10 for the rest of the world.
I think that G had enough time to recrawl my site and recalculate all geo targeting factors. I can't understand why it doesn't rank well in the US. I'm loosing about 80% of clients as my primary market is the US.
Your thoughts? May there exist any manually added geo-specific ranking factors for my site?
May a reconsideration request help?

[glengara]

I suspect G may be using local search data to identify and boost US sites, it'd make some sense as there is no "Pages from the US" option.