Google thinks my site is from another country

[web37]

We started out as local site in many different countries in the world, except in America. Consequently, our .com site historically got 80% of its traffic from Canadians. About a year ago we launched an American version of the site on the .com address. I associated the site with the United States in Webmaster Tools. I was also able to obtain a lot of high PR links from American sites. The site is also being hosted out of America.

Despite all my best efforts, we are not ranking well in Google.com search listings. Sites that have little content and link to us are ranking before our site. Strangely, the .com site shows well in Google Canada's search results. In fact, if you go to Google Canada and select the "pages from Canada" radio button, you find our .com site in the listings. So it appears that Google thinks our .com site is for Canadians.

My 2 questions:

1. Does the fact that Google thinks our site is more relevant to Canadians than Americans hurt our rankings in our Google.com results?

2. What other techniques should I go after to help Google realize the .com site is for Americans?

[tedster]

This kind of geo-location error seems to happen a good bit. I'm not sure that Google would take any action on any one individual case - they might prefer just to note the information as a data point they can use to imporge their machine logic.

Still, I would suggest you bring this to their attention - you can use the Reconsideration Request form in WMT, or Google Groups. You could also do the "pages from canada" search and then use the link at the bottom of the results that says "Dissatisfied? Help us improve"

It's the fact that your site shows under "pages from Canada" that is the clearest evidence that they've got it wrong, in my opinion.

[wheel]

It can sometimes take a while for Google to figure out the geo change. So patience may help.

The other thing to consider is that google.com rankings are exponentially more difficult than the .ca rankings. Being #1 in a google.ca search may get you #300 rankings in google.com. (I just searched my domain in a local google vs. google.com. I'm #1 in the local google, #25 in google.com. #1 and #18 on another term. And I have a fair number of american backlinks.).

I suspect the solution is actually what tedster suggested, just throwing out those other two scenarios as things I've seen with geo googles.

[Whitey]

Just to help those data points and add one more to the list :

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3687429.htm On results from google.co.uk [ filtered with "sites in UK" ] we are showing both our .COM and .co.uk site in positions 45 and 46 for the same term.
Neither site is hosted in the UK or has any Whois information for the UK. The only relationship with the UK is the TLD of the 2nd one.

They also have different content.

Is there a Google UK glitch on at the moment ?

Possibly this is more widespread. We now have .com ; .co.uk and .ca and 2 reports

[Lorel]

Do you have an american address in the footer of all pages?

Also submitting to Google Local and Yahoo Local may help to straighten out the new location.

[dhaliwal]

you can do it easily using google webmaster tools.
that is the best option