Geo targeting issue and hosting

[Digital360]

Hi guys and gals, this is not a problem per se, but an oddity that I would appreciate some insight on from the big juicy brains in this community.

Our site had hosting in the US, and I was concerned that therefore our relevance to our own country (Australia) was diminished because of it.  For one of our main keywords we were a few spots behind the competitor on the 1st page for an australian searcher, but when i searched the same keyword from Google.com with gl=us to show US only results, we outranked the competitors by a few spots.  On page elements aside (if anything we had more geo identifiers on the ranking page in question) I wanted to move hosts anyway and got hosting in Australia.

The next week our search traffic jumped by 25%. But it was almost all US traffic.  Australian traffic was unchanged.

Any idea how this could happen?  It's an .AU domain, hosted in Australia, with on page clearly identifying Australia.

I checked webmaster tools and our geo is properly set to Australia.  I checked the keywords that the traffic increased for and they are not geo specific at all.  Besides that I don't know how else to pin this down.

Thanks.

[BenFox]

Have you checked that there weren't any well documented algo changes going on at the time? Maybe you were a winner from Penguin or something.

Alternatively have you looked to see how the new traffic broke down? Was it all on head terms or was it in the long tail?

Did anything else change on the site at the time? Maybe the page load speed went down?

I agree it does seem a bit odd but it could just be coincidence.

And congratulations on getting all that extra traffic.