Spanish language site ranking low in US for searches in Spanish

[Florakel]

I have a very specific issue I could not find any good information on so far.
We run a website in Spanish that targets the US Hispanic population. So most of the searches will be from within the US in Spanish and in most cases using the English version of Google.com.

When I check the ranking in google.com (search terms in Spanish, google.com in English) most of our pages rank considerably lower than they do on google.com in Spanish, international version.
Also if I use local Spanish versions of Google like google.com.mx we rank number one for some phrases and rank 20 positions lower on google.com in English.

First I thought that might be a "feature" meaning google.com in English favoring other websites but that's not the case. Other Spanish websites do not have the problem. For example websites that rank number two behind us on Google.com.mx rank number one on google.com and we do not appear in the first 30 results for Spanish keywords.

Our site is hosted in the US and uses a .us tld. I looked at the other websites that do not have this problem and the only difference I could find is that we are specifying the content language in a meta tag while the others aren't. Can that be the reason? Has anyone else ever experienced a similar problem with his non-english content not ranking well in google.com (US) for searches in the foreign language?

Thanks for any input on this issue,
Thomas

[Whitey]

I don't think this principle is limited only to language specific sites. My view is it's part of a more compelx geographical problem Google has in selecting the most relevant results to a "market".

Numerous localisation issues with the serving of results seem to play havoc if you want multi location targeting , irrespective of language. Language targeting overiding geographic settings is an interesting one to try and work out. I'm all ears.

[Florakel]

Whitey, I agree, this is part of a very complex issue. But the site's geo targeting should be clear to google by the .US TLD. As you said it would be interesting to understand the indicators that Google uses to calculate the relevancy based on language and location.

Maybe Google takes into account the TLD and prefers English content on a .US Domain and therefore does not rank it high for searches from within the US. But why would it give highest relevancy to a .US site on international Spanish versions of Google?