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Back in September 2004 I reported traffic changes in a thread called International divisions from Mayor Search Engines bring more traffic to U.S. sites.
Since then lots have changed. Yahoo! Search (Mexico) rethought their decision and in late October '04 it switched back to Mexican hosted sites for ranking preference. Their test only lasted about less than 3 months.
After closely monitoring traffic for the last few days I can verify that the T1MSN Search engine from Mexico has also rethought their August decision and switched its algorithmic preference for local hosted websites. Meaning that if your website is hosted in Mexico, regardless of the TLD used (.com, .com.mx, .mx, etc.) it will rank higher. If you are a US hosted website and you are targeting spanish keywords + landing pages this is most likely what happened to your traffic :
Google Mexico remians to give preference to any sites on the web rather than Mexico sites. So thier test keeps going and going and going . . .
SearchEngineWatch has another forum topic very related to this called Should Search Engines adopt different results outside the U.S.? which is still open for discussion.
