I had set my geographic target for my main domain (that's hosted in the United States) from Unlisted to United States on June 5, 2013, in Google Webmaster Tools. The results? My average United States traffic dropped 50% within 6 hours for my subdomain, but not my main domain. My international traffic dropped 80%... which is to be expected, but I didn't expect Google to weaken my rank in the United States, that over 75% of my traffic was coming from to begin with. Meanwhile, my CTR oddly improved from 13% to 30%, and my overall impressions in Google dropped 80%. Has anyone ever experienced a similar situation? Or does it take Google a certain amount of days/weeks to re-rank a website after a webmaster requests a geographic target change?
Interesting. I haven't come across such a situation before. I did set one site to geo-target the USA once and didn't notice any difference, so I eventually disabled it. I've re-enabled it on that particular site to see what happens (I like SEO experiments ). I know Google now treats subdomains as internal (it never used to), so I would have thought the geo-targeting extends to subdomains, too. A drop in US rank just doesn't make sense, taking all into consideration. Is there anything else that happened around the same time (or a couple of days before)? I would recommend asking on: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!categories/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking Hopefully someone from Google will respond (or a TC who reads your post properly).