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We used to get good traffic from both google.co.uk and google.com as some mobile devices are set to use google.com by default and its still showing the correct listings for all other sites which rank in the uk search in google.com so its more curiosity as to why we were being penalized.

The other point is our not wanting to miss out on foreign visitors who are looking for hotels in Blackpool as it is a tourist hotspot so to speak.

We're clearing cache and checking in incognito browsers to check rankings and to add to the mystery some visitors (depending on isp's) see the sites on page 1.

Thanks for the offer of checking rankings, we have this covered.

Pre-penguin we had 2 sites which dominated the Google search for "blackpool hotels" and hundreds of variations. The sites are beginning  to perform again for the longer keywords and most are returning to page 1. The money term, so to speak, is "blackpool hotels" as it gets over 27,000 searches in google per month.

One of our main competitors had/has a much worse linking profile than us and they jumped back into page 1. They hold less content for their clients than we do too. With the content of our competitors and ourselves being related to the UK no overseas office are in play.

Geographically our servers are located in the US, simply down to budget at this time. The links we have were never paid for and we've never really launched any campaigns down to our content being so good.

Neither site has any duplication of its content on other domain names (this was removed in May) and all duplicate content was redirected to the main or given canonical meta info.

Rankings were always top 5 in both google.com and google.co.uk pre-penguin.

All the rankings in Bing and Yahoo have been unaffected with the post-penguin changes we've made which does point out the links we had were poor to begin with.

Does this all sound like its to do with old links from duplicate sites still playing a part?

Its a good point you make, but all the sites ranking in the top 4 pages remain the same in google.com search for the same keyphrase that rank in google.co.uk - all apart from our site(s) which seem to be penalized.

Would this be down to a difference in algorithms on differing google servers? Could some be seeing content we've removed to get back the .co.uk rankings?

How can our website rank on page 3 in google.co.uk and yet it ranks on page 20 for the same keyword on google.com?

This doesn't seem to affect our competitors though and its only our site that is being affected/penalized.