I'll take a look at Ahrefs - never used it before, thanks.

Press release might be a good idea. So looking at everything as a whole, the main issue just might be the percentage of .com links compared to .co.uk links?

Chris.

We did have a drop in traffic in April from Penguin, but the US rankings are still very strong, so for any Penguin penalisation wouldnt it be applied equally across all indexes?  Ah, well spotted on that site - we'll get that link removed straight away - in fact I thought that was already gone.

With the explosion of the band, again if this was a a major factor, wouldnt we have dropped equally on Google.com ?

Thanks for your help.

Hi Bernita,

Rankings for other keywords have also dropped too, only on Google.co.uk though.

Did you look at this in OpenSite Explorer? We did remove a number of site-wide links that we thought might be causing a problem, and these were taken off about 3 months ago.

Wouldn't this also effect Google.com rankings though? This is what is confusing us.

Hi Alex,

Yes the site is registered on Webmaster Tools, and no it doesnt have any geo-targeting set. We did experiment with this a few months back, but it has been reset to nothing for the last 2 months.

We definitely don't want to lose US traffic.

Chris.

I run an extremely popular news & community website at http://www.onedirection.net, but we're having a few ranking issues in Google.co.uk.

The site gets most of its traffic from the USA which isnt a bad thing - but for our key term "one direction", we currently don't rank at all on Google.co.uk.

The site is located on a server based in Manchester, UK, and we used to rank very well earlier this year - fluttering about in position 5-7 most of the time.

However earlier this year, around July, we started to fall down to page 2 or 3, and at the start of this month we don't rank at all for "one direction" on Google.co.uk. On Google.com however we're very strong, always on page one.

We're definitely indexed on .co.uk, just not for main search term - which I find a bit frustrating.

All the content on our site is unique, and we write 2-4 stories every day. We have an active forum too, so a lot of our content is user-generated. We've never had any "unnatural link building" messages in Webmaster Tools, and our link profile looks fine to me.

Do we just need more .co.uk links, or are we being penalised for something? (I can't imagine what though). It certainly seems that way though.

Another site, "www.onedirection.co.uk" which is never updated and has a blatant ad for something completely unrelated on its homepage, ranks above us at the moment-  which I find quite frankly appalling as our site is pretty much regarded as the worlds most popular One Direction news and fan site.

We've spent the last few months improving the page-load times of our site, and we've reduced any unneccesary internal linking on the site. Approx 2 months ago we launched a new forum on the site, 301'ing all the old forum links to the new one, so that could have had an impact on rankings - but we'd expect to see an impact on Google.com as well if this was an issue.

We definitely feel that we should be ranking higher on Google.co.uk.

Does anyone have any ideas what the iproblems could be?

Cheers,

Chris.