Poor Google.co.uk ranking for a UK based .net, but great Google.com

[PixelKicks]

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.

[Alex-Harford]

Is the site registered with Google Webmaster Tools? If so, is it geo-targeted to a particular country? Do you have links from other UK sites? Do you have a physical UK address you could list as a contact on the site?

Be aware you might lose some US traffic if you do decide to change/set a location, though you can still target a particular country and rank well in others.

[skg.ppa]

Did your rankings just start falling for "one direction" or related keywords as well?

I've noticed recently that google has started "penalizing" websites for specific keywords only, leaving the remaining keywords untouched.

I took a quick peek and your backlinks for "one direction" at a domain level are higher than "onedirection.net". I'd try and fix that by getting the anchors changed or building new links.

[PixelKicks]

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.

[PixelKicks]

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.

[Alex-Harford]

That could be an issue. Was it targeted to the UK before?

Looking further into it, the Penguin updates throughout the year (the first in April)  don't match directly with the timing of drops you mentioned, but some of your "one direction" exact match anchor text links could have been devalued. The site-wide footer link here for example, on a completely unrelated website (that's a big no-no in Google's eyes): http://www.tapshop321.com/blog/

How about the explosion in popularity of the band? Your Domain and Page Authority is lower than most of the results on the first 3 pages. This is worldwide but illustrates the point - there will be a lot more competition from other sites now: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=one%20direction&cmpt=q

[skg.ppa]

I personally prefer Ahrefs due to the more frequently updated and larger sized index, plus the interface and graphs are great.

If they have only dropped on google.co.uk, while I don't have personal experience with it and it's just theoretical hear-say and common sense, google has been moving in a direction to personalize search results even more, in which case it might be explained by your small percentage of backlinks from UK websites. (https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/onedirection.net)

You can do a press release targeted to UK, and see if that makes any difference. Make the Press Release LSI related to one direction, UK, and have your website mentioned in there, preferably in a link and in a sentence containing UK.

[PixelKicks]

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.

[PixelKicks]

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.

[skg.ppa]

With SEO, you can never be certain. Since I don't have firsthand experience in it, I can't promise anything and neither can anyone else who doesn't(have firsthand experience). However, it never hurts to try. It's all about giving google the correct signals and hoping it picks up on them and it is what it's looking for.

[Alex-Harford]

"the US rankings are still very strong, so for any Penguin penalisation wouldnt it be applied equally across all indexes?"

I'm not sure - I think the updates are usually language based as Google phrases it along the lines of "1% of English language queries will be affected" - but tapshop321 is UK-based so who knows...

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

It's just a hunch but I'd say no, perhaps based on the above, quality of links from either country and potentially hundreds of other factors.

If I was you I'd write occasional guest articles, with a link back to onedirection.net, for other related UK websites - fansites or official sites of similar bands perhaps. I wouldn't bother too much with getting exact match anchor text - if you use your URL you have the match anyway and you don't want your link profile to be too heavily waited towards one phrase, just in case (even though you should naturally get 'one direction' matches). Mix it up a bit if you go ahead, with URL links and phrases like 'one direction fansite'. Even just a mention of One Direction in these articles could help.

Have you interviewed One Direction or similar UK bands? If you could, they're likely to link to the interview on your site.

If you haven't already, perhaps setting up Google+ Authorship would help too.