Country in Contact us page... does it affect rankings?

[morpheus83]

I have .com domain and I have targeted users in the United States on Webmaster tools. However I am not based in the US, not in the same continent even, and our country is mentioned in the elaborate contact us page.

I am noticing a steady drop in US traffic over the past couple of months, I do believe Google does give relevance to the country of the publisher.

What are your thoughts, as all my content is targeted at the US audience.

Should I remove the address and include a contact us form or so? Or should I include a fictitious US address (not very keen on that).

[aakk9999]

I personally would not remove the address because it could make the site less trustworthy to visitors, and in fact to Google too.

Have you excluded any other reasons for a steady traffic drop? Did you analyse what keywords dropped (you could do a 3-month analysis based on WMT Query data).

[RedBar]

I have experienced similar with some sites in various countries over a period of years, for some inexplicable reason G gets things all mixed-up and doesn't want to rank them.

I have a .co.uk right now, fully indexed yet cannot be found for anything except for unique on-page text, it's utterly bizarre...you've got a G-Bug!

[morpheus83]

@aakk9999,

I have seen a splurge in Google referrals from the country I have included in my address, in fact the traffic has increased for the continent as well (Asia).

but at the same time our US traffic has constantly dropped. Perhaps Google thinks we are more relevant or moreso have more authority in the said country than the US.

[andyhicks85]

Yes, it can effects like in this case- if you have hosting in one country while trying to rank in another which obviously affects the search engine presence of your website.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 1:18 pm (utc) on Apr 7, 2014]
[edit reason] No links allowed for New Members [/edit]

[morpheus83]

My website is hosted in the same country where I would to rank in.

[aakk9999]

Just wondering - do you have Google Places account with the address from your contact us page?

Another thought came to mind - have you thought of blocking your contact page by robots and see if this makes a difference?