Google region SERP flip flop?

[sbsb]

Ok so my seo was progressing nicely on a very competitive set of keywords for one of my sites. I was moving up from page 2 and page 3 and just starting to make traction getting onto page 1 in the united states.

Come mid april, on one particular day, my US traffic/ranking dropped off the map, and at the same time it rose dramatically in australia, literally like an on/off lightswitch. For e.g. 2-400 visits per day from the US to zero, and zero visits from australia to 60 or so.

My site is a .com, hosted in the US. I had made one small area geo ip targeted, but if google spidered from the US it would get us content, and if from australia, australian content (and so on for other countries). i.e. it conforms to google anti-cloaking guidelines as far as I'm aware.

I did several things like setting webmaster tools to undefined or blank, as well as backlinking with US specific text to see if google woke up. I even removed the geo-ip targeting to try and alleviate it.

Its been nearly 3 weeks and still I have almost zero google US traffic.

I didnt set it to US in Google WMT because I didnt want to loose the rest of my global traffic (the site is international). I still get a moderate amount of traffic globally, but I am really annoyed with the weird labeling of the site in googles results.

Has anyone seen similar effects before, and if so how did you fix it?

[sbsb]

Noone else has had the same problem ever?

[PhilipSEO]

This may be an interesting case, let's look into it.

Originally Posted by sbsb

My site is a .com, hosted in the US. I had made one small area geo ip targeted, but if google spidered from the US it would get us content, and if from australia, australian content (and so on for other countries). i.e. it conforms to google anti-cloaking guidelines as far as I'm aware.

Please say more. How exactly is this implemented?

Also, did you by any chance get a lot of links of links from Australian sites?

[sbsb]

Originally Posted by PhilipSEO

This may be an interesting case, let's look into it.

Please say more. How exactly is this implemented?

Also, did you by any chance get a lot of links of links from Australian sites?

Geotargeting
OK so the geotargeting is for a small block on the main site URL, think products on amazon.com, hotels on a hotel site etc that are targeted to users based on their contry of origin.

i.e. if you come from the US I assume that you want to know about item xyz which is more US specific than item ABC which is related to australia.

So the geotargeting grabs the IP address on the server side, looks it up against a geo-ip database, decides which country the visitor is from and serves up 5 results targeted to the country of origin and includes that in the page.

Consequently regarless of the client agent type (google spider, regular web browser etc) clients originating from the same country will receive the same type of geo-targeted content.

Keep in mind this block forms about 20% of the page.

This geotageting has been removed since the drop occurred, and is now serving up randomised results on a per-request basis. i.e. you will see a mix of regional results on any given request.


Traffic
The whole ranking change was intriguing, because the drop in the US traffic occurred on EXACTLY the same day as the spike in australian traffic.

I did build one or two links from australian business directories, probably a month or so prior to this change. I had also built links in from canadian and global business directories as well. Overall, the link diversity has an extremely minor component coming from australia, maybe 1-10 out of thousands of links (to the best of my knowledge). Google WMT has indexed the australian business directory link however.

I have gone out of my way in the previous 3 weeks to have links built with terms relating to the US/america in the hopes that it might prod google into noticing the content is relevant to the US, as well as putting specific links on the landing page to multi-regional content (e.g. "quick search for XYZ in the united states"). This doesnt appear to have had any effect other than giving me a small number of serp listings for more obscure regional US terms. Rankings for the core terms remain unchanged since being hurt.

One of the next steps I have been considering is to try to submit the site to yahoo business directories under the US/global section in a hope that that might upset the apple cart.

I am extremely hesitant to set WMT to regionalise for US in case I loose my remaining traffic and gain nothing in the US.