Penalty or Filter for US and CA results - 3 months standing

[maximus12]

OK, I have waited 3 months and cannot figure out this filter or penalty.

Here go's:

I recently took over a site that was a terrible static PHP site. Slapped wordpress on it, re-constructed the whole site into an organized CMS with content written by the owner himself. All old nuked pages have been 301'd to corresponding pages. The site now has good original content, is being updated once a week with a relative posts to the industry, is getting some good natural links and the TITLES and DESCR have been correctly optimized.

Our main targeted keywords are ranking on the first and second page in Google Mexico (google.com.mx), Google UK and even in Google.com when switching to "English" from Mexico.

Now if I switch to a proxy in the US or CANADA and do the search, our main keywords ("Blue Widgets") are all after page 10 position 101, sometimes 99. They never move and always stay at this position.

Example:

*Searching in Google.com.mx - "Blue Widgets" position 4
*Searching in Google.com in Mexico - "Blue Widgets" position 8
*Searching Google.co.uk in a UK proxy - "Blue Widgets" position 9

****Searching Google in a US proxy - "Blue Widgets" position 101
****Searching Google in a CANADIAN proxy - "Blue Widgets" position 99

Now here is some input. Before I took the site over, it was using google adwords to get traffic and it already had footer links on 6 sites that also belong to the owner but different industries. I have not removed them yet. They all have the same anchor text. This will be the first thing I remove but I wanted to get everyone's ideas first?

Thanks,
Maximus





Site does not seem to have a penalty becasue it ranks for both "mydomain" and mydomain.com.

[Robert Charlton]

Hi maximus12 - Just to clarify the situation, from the description of how you're searching, I'm assuming that you and the site are based in Mexico and that it's an English language site.

It's less clear what regions you're targeting. Because you mention Google.co.uk, I'm thinking that maybe you're targeting English speakers not only in North America but also worldwide.

What's your site's TLD? I'm guessing .com, but I don't see that in your post.

What geo regions are your inbound links from? Is there any geo-related vocabulary in any of your target phrases?

Also, assuming you are in Mexico, are you in a major city? And, beyond using the proxies, did you set your location over in the left hand column, where it says: Buscar cerca de…? Logged in or out, etc etc? There's a lot to be considered these days when describing international searches. ;)

[maximus12]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your response. Let me clarify and answer your questions:

1) I'm assuming that you and the site are based in Mexico and that it's an English language site:

YES, IN MEXICO AND THE SITE IS TARGETED TO A NORTH AMERICAN MARKET. THE DOMAIN IS A .COM HOSTED IN THE US.

2) It's less clear what regions you're targeting:

TARGETING NORTH AMERICA, USA AND CANADA. WAS USING THE UK SEARCH RESULTS AS AN EXAMPLE

3) What's your site's TLD?

.COM

4) What geo regions are your inbound links from?

USA, MOSTLY FROM .COMS, A FEW .COM.MX AND NO .CA'S. BTW WE HAVE SOME VERY GOOD LINKS: YAHOO DIRECTORY, BOTW, PR.COM, RELATED ENGLISH SITES

5)Also, assuming you are in Mexico, are you in a major city? And, beyond using the proxies, did you set your location over in the left hand column

YES IN A MAJOR CITY. NOT LOGGED INTO TO GOOGLE. JUST USING THE REGULAR SEARCH WITHOUT BEING LOGGED IN.

Hope I cleared things up a but. To make a long story short, we are not ranking in the US or Canada, all other countries seem to be ranking fine...