I have a general question. When I look for my site on www.google.com I am listed on position #30 at the moment. It used to be #3 for nearly 5 years for my main search term. When I search on www.google.co.nz and tick worldwide, my site shows up on position #6, ticking the option "pages from New Zealand" my site is nowhere to be found as expected since my site is a .com site and hosted in New Zealand but not specific for that country. My question is, shouldn't all worldwide search results be the same on all Google search sites or do country localised Google sites use different criteria’s for their rankings? Google New Zealand’s search results for my main search term have definitely been affected by the recent updates, a site written in French is now #2, but shows completely different results than all other Google sites I checked.
To make it even more complicated for you, Google geotargets based on the end user's IP. So results at www.google.com are not going to be the same for a user from New Zealand (at the same URL/same query). The user from New Zealand will have results weighted towards sites in New Zealand or having to do with New Zealand.
Thanks for this – not a SEO expert and haven’t noticed before. It’s all a bit mind-boggling for me. Still don’t understand that Google now shows me a French language site on top of the search results (#3) on google.co.nz and also on google.com but even ranked #2. Maybe Google read my name somewhere which is a French name and decided I should have a look at a French site for a change. That's what I call service!