OK. Just discovered a curious behaviour, in fact completely different results on google.ca vs. google.com. i won't disclose the URL of my site here but I thought of having a -40 penalty filter until i checked google.ca Up there all the rankings are like before, page 1, i even get a lot more results for the keyword on google.com i obviously still got the filter being dumped on page 5 when i check the datacenteres i get only page 5 results do you experience the same?
of course, but my site is not hosted in the .ca nor does it have only .ca backlinks. page 1 and page 5 is a huge difference to just blame it on geotargeting?
Yeah Its not necessary to be having a .ca domain or having a .ca backlink specifically. A .com can also be included under ca.
2 days ago i lost all keyword rankings which were on page 1 to page5/6/7 on .com, any datacenter, any country domain (i didn't check .ca though) all results went down about -40, so I guessed of having received a penalty filter. others say: sandbox, change of algorithm, whatever, who knows but obviously the filter didn't apply to .ca i'm amazed
this is where search engines can fall down, they will automatically decide on the most relevant area to present your site, but this may not always be the one you want. Obviously you've tried geo targetting, but I can't think of any other avenue to pursue.