Local vs Global Search Results Yield Very Different Rankings Lately

[sbrault74]

When I monitor my website's rankings, I always do it from Canada (direct connection) and from the USA (using a VPN in Arizona). I've been monitoring rankings this way for the last 3 years.

Most of the time, I got similar results (-5 / +5) from both location.

My website is a ".com" and targets an international audience.

Lately (is it since Panda 22?), I've seen dramatic differences in rankings from both locations. Some keywords will rank in the top 10 on Google.com (from the USA) while they will appear on page 3, 4, 5 and even lower on Google.ca (from Canada).

The thing is, the top 10 results on Google.ca are not even from canadian websites. Fact of the matter, there are even some results from India websites (.in) in the top 10!

I understand that Google.ca will give advantage to websites from Canada (or targeting the canadian market / .ca domain name) over international / US websites but there's never been such a huge difference in rankings until lately.

Has anybody else experienced this?

What are your thoughts?

[james406]

Have you looked at the hosting country of all websites concerned? I have a .co.uk site that appears in .ca even though it's very directly targeting the UK but is hosted on a dedicated server in Canada.

The other thing to consider is that possibly these sites outranking you in google.ca are targeting .ca in their Webmaster tools, even if it's hard to tell who'd they be targeting based on the sites themselves.