Ranking in "pages from NZ" and not US - a real oddity

[Simsi]

Hi guys

I have an oddity. I have 6 small sites (.com and .net) hosted on shared hosting at Dotster (may/not be relevant). The server the sites are on is in Washington according to Whois - or at least the IP is - and Dotster is US based. The sites are aimed and optimized primarily for the USA and I haven't set a locale in WMT.

However, 3 of the sites for some reason are ranking very high (2,3 and 4) on a high-traffic term (that I haven't even optimised for) in Google New Zealand of all places, but only when selecting "pages from new Zealand"! On all other Google local searches they rank nowhere for the term. I am UK based if that matters. I don't even mention NZ in any text nor do I have any reason to as that is way off my target market.

Any idea why that might be? Seems really odd.

Cheers,

Simsi

[tedster]

It does seem really odd - you seem to have covered all the usual bases and the next suspect would be a true Googlebug. You might try a Reconsideration Request - it will be read and if you explain things clearly and there is a bug, it may get fixed.

You also might bring this up in Google's Webmaster Help forums - if you're willing to publicly expose your domain name, that is (it's a requirement over there, and that's the exact opposite of how we do things here.)

[Simsi]

Thanks Tedster. Sounds like a plan :)