Global optimisation

How do you tell Google that your target is global?

[Wilburforce]

A friend's site (with multilingual versions) has been losing traffic, and one potential issue is that Google seems to localising results.

Using hreflang helps (e.g.) French language searches to find French pages, but how do you tell Google that a page is relevant for a product that isn't location-specific? Google is very good at telling us how to target location, but how do you turn location off, regardless of the language used?

[l1fejosh]

I started to research and target US keywords (we are located in Canada).

We've added unique and rich landing pages for some States that regularly visit our site, we're currently growing more in the US market than our own... which is good, but means we're losing visibility for our own country.

I've also heard about redirecting your traffic via "geo-location"? I guess you can redirect your traffic by country to its own landing page or country-specific TLD.

Take what I say with a grain of salt, but this is what I have been doing.