johoney - 2:29 am on Mar 28, 2008 (gmt 0)

The site is in a pretty small and low competition niche and currently ranks around position 27 in yahoo and 550 in google.com (its #1 in google.ie) for its target keyword.

Our site has excellent quality and quantity inbound links from international sites (1xPR7, 4xPR6, to name a few and also yahoo directory listings and business organizations in the target niche) as well as good internal link structure. More and better links than the top SERP results. We have never spammed in any sense.

The site is a .ie domain and has existed since late 1999. Our title tags are good as far as I can see but we still have this terrible ranking in Google.com for our target keyword phrase. Is there some penalty that we are not aware of and some way of detecting one?

I suspected that we don't rank well in SERPS because of our .ie domain name and hosting in the UK but I notice that there are very high ranking sites in the google.com search results pages that have country TLDs, fewer quality and quantity of links and younger in terms of years on the web.

Any ideas?

ps. we would change from our .ie TLD as a last resort or change to a keyword based domain name but would prefer to use other tactics.