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Yeah I deliberately showed you that as a pretty awful example haha! This is what I'm dealing with. Unfortunately most of the links follow a very similar theme and that's why I'm worried I'm going to be removing a lot of links and alerting something at Google!! Also, there's a few links in the same format as that example, but which have brand anchor texts and the page has Page Rank - I assume it should still go?

It's not against Google guidelines for two of your domains to rank for one query - as long as what Google sees for those domains matches what users see, that's permitted and wouldn't be considered cloaking. I can't speak to the UK legal aspects, of course. Whether it's a a good idea or not is a bit tougher to answer. If your removed geo-targeting and your two sites seemed to have very similar English-language content, it's possible they could compete with each other in unexpected ways or that one could get filtered out. Typically, if that happens, Google will filter out the .com in the Google.co.uk searches, so, at worst, you'd be back where you started. I don't think it's a big risk - just something to keep your eyes open about. If ranking both lets you hit some terms that you couldn't otherwise, their may be a business advantage. I'd just monitor the SERPs closely and make sure you don't encounter side effects. The only thing I would warn about is don't try to trick Google into thinking the .com is the UK site or vise-versa. If Google naturally shows both and that lets you target different keywords, that's fine.

Hey there...got your pm.  I can understand you not wanting to share your url in public. Take a look at your site in open site explorer and click on "anchor text".  You'll see that your most common anchor text is your keyword, and it's definitely not a brand.  You've got 191 links using that keyword as anchor text.  Your next most common is your url and for that you've got 16 links. That's definitely Penguin material unfortunately. It may seem unfair, but the Google guidelines tell us not to make links for the purpose of increasing our position on the SERPS.  It is very unlikely that 191 links with anchor text appeared naturally. Unfortunately you're going to need to get the majority of those links removed in order to recover and that's likely a tough process. If you had had an unnatural links warning in your WMT you could try to remove as many as possible and then show Google your attempts to remove the others.  But, because Penguin is algorithmic, the only way to recover is to do some drastic work at getting the keyword anchors removed or possibly changed to your url. I have found that about 10-15% of webmasters actually respond to my requests to remove links.  That's just not going to work for a site hit by Penguin.  If you can't get the majority of these links removed then you may need to start over with a new domain.

Hi Coolpink, from what I've understood from your question the potential panorama for your client can be this: .com for UK .us for USA both sites with almost identical content. If I was you, I would follow these best practices: On Google Webmaster Tools I'd specify that domain.com must geotarget UK only. Even though .com domains name are meant to be global, if you order Google to geotarget your site for a specific country, then it should follow your directive even if your domain is a generic domain name; Again on Google Webmaster Tools. I'd specify that the domain .us must geotarget the USA only territory. Be aware that .us is the Country Level Domain of United States (as .co.uk is the cTLD of UK), therefore Google should have to geotarget automatically domains with that termination to the USA. I don't know the nature of your client's site, but if it is an eCommerce, surely there local signals that you may or must use: currencies (Pounds and Dollars), Addresses, Phone Numbers. You write that cannot be merged the US and UK market also because of the regional spelling to change. This is a correct intuition, also in term of International SEO. So, when creating the new .us site, pay attention to this issue and remember to translate to American English those contents that were writting in British English (i.e.: analise > analize... ). These regional differences help a lot Google understanding the target of the site A good idea in order to reinforce the fact that the .com site is meant just for the UK market, it should be to add in this site the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag this way: <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.domain.us">(please go read not at the end)</rel="alternate"> BING > This page in the Bing’s  Webmaster Center Blog  (“How to tell Your Website’s Country and Language”) explains quite well what are the best practices to follow in order to have a site ranking in the regional versions of Bing. Actually the Metadata embedded in the document solution is the most important between the ones Bing suggests: should be the one to add in the .us site (target: USA) Note well: the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is a "page level tag", not domain. That means that the home page will have: <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.domain.us">(as seen above)</rel="alternate"> That page "A" will have: <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.domain.us/page-equivalent-to-A"></rel="alternate"> and so on.