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.