Getting unrelated visitors, targeting Cyprus

[jediviper]

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System: The following 6 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5027006.htm [webmasterworld.com] by not2easy - 2:51 pm on Feb 17, 2021 (atl -4)

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The theory about links is not valid, at least in my case.

I have a domain totally clean from spam links with more than 1000 links. The majority of them comes from 100% local directories and citations and the rest from 301 redirects from the UK, from expired 100% relevant domains.
Does this mean that it ranks in the UK? No. Does it mean that it ranks in the local market, where the links are coming from? Also no. I think Google has no clue about new domains and doesn't pay attention to their signals about which market they are targetting.

Moreover, it has kws from total irrelevant EU countries, like Romania, Spain, Portugal, when the content is 100% in English.
Also , no matter that in GSC there is a specific country defined. The same happens with the use of the targeted country in mentions inside the text. The targeted country is also mention at the Meta title, in the H1 of the homepage and in dozen other areas.
But, so far there are zero kws from the targeted country.

[Robert Charlton]

jediviper... links are not the only ranking factor. They're one of many... and I suspect that Google is doing its best to reduce and modify their effect.

...the rest from 301 redirects from the UK, from expired 100% relevant domains.

I doubt that these are helping you, and you'll have to clarify much about these. Eg, were these your old domains, say when you consolidated old sites? Or are these domains new acquired, intended to funnel "link juice" into your current domain?

Also, time to rank... how old is your domain?

[martinibuster]

Google is pretty good at localizing different forms of English. For example, in certain parts of Canada sites with the Queens English rank better. Server host location used to be a factor as well. Not sure about now but I've been told that it still is.

Links may be one of several factors, but that's just my opinion, I'm not stating a fact. For example, I've found that in my experience, if I wanted more search traffic from Australia, getting more links from Australian sites did the trick.

[Robert Charlton]

The theory about links is not valid, at least in my case.

jediviper... just to add the point that there's no way you can talk about Google's algo and generalize the importance of a factor from one case.

Also... there's something basically wrong with the idea that SEO is like a checklist, and if you check all the boxes you should rank. It simply does not work that way. There are a lot of sites out there now, and in some niches, the competition is formidable. The expectation that many here have that they ought to perform well in Google is often unrealistic.

[jediviper]

Hey @Robert Charlton thank you for your comments.
I will be glad to explain more about this new domain.
And for sure we can't judge 100% the Google decisions, with just a few cases.

- The 5 expired domains that I am using with 301 redirects are not old domains that I owned before. I just bought them and using them for simply redirecting 100% relevant niche links to my new domain.
- The website is 5 months old. It's a DA8, UR20/DR12, has 1.100 links, 179 ref.domains. 18-20 kws according to Ahrefs and none of them is coming from the local market.

And if there is no checklist that can help with the ranking of old or new domains, then it looks like it's more of a random situation, that doesn't sound promising for all of SEO professionals.

In my case, I also use this new domain as an experiment, as it's in a very specific niche, in a new market for me, and I am pretty sure that 90% of the competition is NOT doing any seo.
For example, there is a DA2 domain with 5 backlinks at the 5th position for one of the most important kws that I am targeting. I am troubled how this domain is managing to stay there, since there is also no content or any special onpage optimisation, schema etc and the only thing I can consider is the age of the domain.

Anyway, I have exhausted the majority of SEO tasks that I could do for now for my domain (on page, links, etc) and I am waiting to see when it will bring some results.