Site excluded from google.com result for certain phrases but not google.com.au

[merlin78]

Hi All,

Firstly I would like to apologise in advance if I am asking a question that has already been answered in the past. I did do quite a bit of research on this issue but couldn't find anything answering my question exactly (although some posts gave me some good ideas for possible reasons).

My problem which has been present for the last year is that for the site I work for (www.discountnewcars.com.au) doesn't show up in Google.com for popular search phrases such as new cars and new car prices. These phrases once ranked extremely high (1-4). However if I limit to only Australian results the site ranks #1 for new cars and #3 for new car prices (really number 1 as the site that occupies position 1 and 2 is an American site - so I'm assuming their site is hosted in Australia). Therefore for the country specific search it ranks higher than other Australian sites for this search phrase but not in the worldwide results where the site seems to vanish from the index.

Furthermore if I search in Google.com (worldwide results) for "new cars" (within inverted commas) the site is ranked #7. I just cannot work out why this is happening. If I search for the phrase, discount new cars, the site ranks #1 as it should.

These factors may help others locate the cause of this problem -
* the site has a pagerank of 4 (I think something is penalising it but haven't been able to work out what).
* Site is hosted in Australia and is a .com.au
* I have 301 redirects from other domains such as discountnewcars.com, .co.nz and .co.uk.
* 382 backward links

If anyone has any ideas on what may be causing this I would really appreciate it.

[merlin78]

Any ideas?

I don't see this being a country-specific domain problem. I am wondering if it is possible to get penalised for a certain keyphrase and not appear in the world results but then appear fine (top rank) in Australian-specific results?

Any help or thoughts would be much appreciated.