I'm wondering why my sites stopped showing up on Google Search for international search. Before October, my sites' pages were still showing up on SERP when the search is done from USA, Singapore, Canada, UK, now my sites only shows in searches made from my country. My pages still maintains their ranks but they do not appear on SERP. When I use VPN to test, my pages don't appear on SERP even if search console says it ranked 1st but when I turn off the VPN, it appears on SERP. I didn't even change anything in "international targeting" option from search console and my sites are .com. Lost 2/3 USA traffic from SERP.
Google Search Location Filtering?
- Thread starter Skared
- Start date
safeSEOboost
Elite Member
- Mar 22, 2010
- 3,277
- 2,272
In order to try finding out what is going on, can you tell us:
- your country
- domain extension
- do your backlinks come from a specific country
- niche
- is the English content high quality
Well:
- My domain extensions are .com
- Backlinks are well scattered to various countries but mostly from USA websites. I don't even get much backlinks from websites based in my country.
- Asian Adult niche
- Yeah English is comparable to native speaker's if not better
Here's the thing, for the last 3 years until this October, I have been ranking very well especially on International searches. In fact, I haven't had any major loss in rankings up to now. However, my sites just vanished from result even for the pages that are still ranking first whenever I try to test searching from other locations. But as soon as I turn off VPN, it reappears.
Approximately, I got 20% increase in local organic traffic now but lost 1/3 to 1/2 western organic traffic. Other Asian traffic remains steady. The growth in local organic traffic could also be due to more content updates.