Ranked on Google.ca but not Google.com Why?

[NameCritic]

Okay, I would like some second opinions about some things.

Can putting a google sitemap on the server and also having a page titled sitemap.php with the same links in it hurt you with any of the search engines?

After putting the sitemap on the server, several pages dropped in link popularity and from search engine saturation both.

In other words, google and yahoo have the page indexed, but it has link popularity in msn and yahoo but not google.

Before it was indexed by all 3 plus had link pop in all 3.

Any reasons anyone here can think of?

Also the pages are still ranking on Google.ca but not on Google.com. Is it because this is a Canadian company that we are not ranking well on .com versus
.ca?

Is there a way to fix this as we are starting to expand into the US and need to be found on Google.com as well? (It is a dot com domain name.

The question is from a client we provide content for. We don't do their SEO work. So may recommend someone to do it for them.

[Dubbya]

You're right. Google lends preference to relevant regional results when the search is performed on the regional server (Google.ca versus Google.com).

If the links are exactly the same in your .xml and .php files, Google may see it as duplicate content. Due to an oversight, I've just encountered this myself and I'm hurtin' pretty badly for it.

If you're hoping to expand into the US, it's time to start building links across North American web directories and expand your advertising to include US servers.

Google's new algorythym now appears to evaluate the relationships between your site and the sites that link to you. If they're in no way related or the sites that link to you are link farms, Google ignores the links and your rankings drop. I've noticed that over a hundred inbound links from unrelated directories and sites have gone missing in the last few weeks.

Try to accumulate links from related sites and your relevancy should start to climb.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by NameCritic

So may recommend someone to do it for them.

I might can help them out if they want.