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I recently took on a client who had a 6 month old site, and had not done any seo or link building. All links so far have been natural, I can't see anything dodgy that would cause a problem. It's fairly niche so just sorting out the page titles and a bit of on site stuff got them ranking on page 1 & 2 in the UK and US for most of their keywords. However their main keyword which is just the name of the product (lets say xxx and xxxs ) does not appear anywhere in the US search, despite ranking #10 in the UK and all related terms ('what is xxx', 'how to use xxx', 'benfits of xxx' etc) having similar rank on both. They didn't have any analytics installed before I took over so I can't see any historical changes in traffic from different keywords. Any ideas why one single keyword would not show up at all just on Google US when everything else is ok?

hey all,  this is my first posting... I have a webpage that is a great resource (ranked 3rd for my keyword) , and unarguably better than the site that is taking the first 2 places. Because my page is a much more useful resource for the same thing I have been looking at who is linking to them and asking them to take a look at mine in the hope that they will replace their link with my more up to date page. The problem is a LOT of the high value links they have (many .edu links) are from old, now unmaintained pages, where I have no chance of getting a link (or even contact with a webmaster) Its frustrating that they have so many good links to such an out of date page. I just wondered if any of you have had a similar situation. It just seems very hard to knock someone off that top spot if they have been established a long time, regardless of the quality of their content. I guess there is no solution to it except to find lot of other high value links myself - so not so much a question as a comment really! but happy to hear peoples own experiences of that sort of situation.