.com ranked where .co.uk site should After Manual Penalty Revoked - Help!!!

[Tricky-40]

Hi All,

I wondered if some could help me as I am at my wits end.

Our website www.domain.co.uk was hit with a manual penalty back in April 26th 2012 for over optomizing our inbound links and after 9 reconciliation request later and over a year and many links removed the penalty was revoked. Yay I hear you cry!

During the year .co.uk was banned we built .com yet did not build any links to it. The purpose of the .com site was to attract an American audience for our products.

.com was hosted on a US server and Geo Targeting set to United States in WMT.

So here is my problem after the ban was revoke we expected .co.uk to spring back to some reasonable positions. Nope that is not the case Google now is ranking our .com site where our .co.uk should be for powerdull keywords in position 1st to 10th

.com has Zero link equity and .co.uk is very reasonable,

So how can I rectify this balls ups and get co.uk listed back where it should be…. I am not bothered where .com ranks.

Note: To the best of my knowledge there are NO cross domain 301 or the like only an image link between the two sites.

I have posted this on WMT forum and it has fallen on deaf ears! ....help me MOZ members you’re my only hope!

Thanks in advance

Richard

PS: If anyone would like the URL’s in question PM me and I will let you know.

[FedeEinhorn]

Is the content on the .com version related to the .co.uk version? If yes, start using the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" so UK traffic goes to that version instead of the .com.

If the content is completely different, then you just need to hang in there. I've read hundreds of cases where the manual penalty was revoked and they still were not able to rank their sites, it will certainly take time and you could be affected by an algorithmic penalty too, which decreases rankings without throwing you out of the index. If that's the case, keep working on the site, keep building good content to earn backlinks (if that doesn't work, go with the next paragraph).

Why don't you serve all countries from the .com version if it is well ranked? (just have a .com/uk/ for your uk traffic... (just an idea)... (remember rel="alternate" hreflang="x").

[MoosaHemani]

Over the last year Google is way too active with updates and there are seriously like tons of updates available till date... I would advise you to see if any new penguin or panda is not attacking the website.

Also you really need to be active on building quality and diversified links to your website to gain Google trust again or else you will not be able to regain the rankings again!