Genuine Backlinks from Trusted Sources Are One of the Best of Those Metrics (Signals)

Ammon Johns 🎓
Well, the basic problem is pretty easy – you're counting all the wrong metrics.
Easy example: you mention the word count of articles, but completely ignore the really important bit – that of a thousand views of your content not one single person found even one of those pages remarkable enough to share and link to.
Hell, apparently that content was so bad that even YOU couldn't find anywhere to promote it with a link worth anything. That part is a huge problem.
Marketing often involves a lot of metrics, but there is only one number that REALLY counts – the conversions. The most important conversion is to measurably 'move' a person. To get them to buy something, or change their opinion on something, and, of course, to get them to become a missionary for your business, spreading the word.
Google's engineers don't just sit down at a blank screen and make up numbers and metrics to use. Instead, they start from known, valuable, meaningful pages that people like, and they spot all the metrics that correlate to those pages being known, valuable and meaningful. The best of those signals, the ones they use in algorithms, are the signals that *only* occur on those known, valuable and meaningful pages, and so are a signal of those qualities.
Genuine links from trusted sources are one of the best of those signals. How do they know they are genuine and trusted? Because those sites only link to pages that score well in the other signals of quality, and not to sites known to buy links, or do link exchanges, etc.
All that said, you've picked low competition pages according to what you believe, and backed up by the scores on the tools you have chosen to use, and still, you couldn't rank. In a SERP as easy as it gets, you couldn't produce a page that ranks. So everything you *think* you know about SEO, doesn't work. Throw it away, and rethink everything, from the basics up.
Buying a domain with existing links didn't work for you. Not the biggest surprise. Google have been a domain registrar for years and years, so they have full access to when domains expire or change hands, or simply change the IP address they map to. They know the history of your page (they cache it) and every other page in the index, including all those links on them, by date. So they know when a link existed BEFORE a site changed hands, and whether the content of the page linked to changed since the link was given, and by how much.
The signal you are sending Google is that this domain used to get links when it was different and owned by someone else, and that once you took over, nobody anywhere has linked to it since. What do you think Google would regard that signal as meaning?
Word counts don't matter to ranking – only that the more words you have, the more chances that really obscure, long-tail word combinations will occur on the page. Quality is not measured by the number of words used, but by how effectively the words were used. Any writer will tell you that it actually takes more skill, and is a higher mark of quality, to be concise yet still just as informative.
Since you know that those old links haven't made you rank even in a pretty darned uncompetitive SERP, you've seen first-hand why many of the link tools like Moz and others, are flawed and don't match up to what Google count. So throw away DA as a metric too. It was only ever useful to matters of distributing the flow of PageRank around your own site to the page level, but in your case, you can clearly see that all those hundreds of old links to the original content of the old owner's version of the site are NOT COUNTING. Chances are that any other link tool will have the same problem. They do not have the same resources as Google for caching, don't have the processing power of Google, etc. so they have to cut corners, and your case is on one of those cut corners.

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Bucur
I'm in a similar boat with you, except I did everything from 0, including" the domain(not new, but 0 ranking for anything).
In one and a half years of YouTubing "how-to," I'm getting pretty darn close to page one, at least for some searches. And I had to learn from building the site, learn some more grammar (not a native English), learn basics for marketing, etc. And I have pretty much the same # of articles as you mentioned. And few real backlinks because I never chased them.
My point is, maybe you need to start again and see what you can improve. If I, as a photographer, managed this well, I bet everyone else can.
Whenever I write an article, I check my competition for that specific topic, see the first 5-10 positions and take the keywords from there and add a tad more info than I find on my competition. (my competitors are both intelligent and great photographers and always seem to know more than I do).
I know I could have done better, but this was my pace.
https://cristian-bucur.com/
Bucur | Professional Photographer In Tokyo, Japan
CRISTIAN-BUCUR.COM
Bucur | Professional Photographer In Tokyo, Japan
Jubair
its very simple to understand, no matter how easy or hard the keywords are. first of all, before writing something, did you just check the keywords kd with ahrefs? that's wrong, even if the keyword has 0 kd and your search intent not match the topic, you can never rank that keyword. so maybe all of your keyword selection was wrong.
2. only checking with tools isn't enough, did you manually check out the keywords? perhaps no
3. If the content is helpful, or useful people just reading and holding on the page, then the algorithm thinks that its a good article, the search engine shows the post to more users, more people find it helpful then it shows to the more people. this is how the algorithm works.
so, finally no matter how many articles or how many words, if people don't like it, then Google not gonna love it. simple
Kim
After reading through all of the comments above, Iam just sad. The typical all the mumbo jumbo people answer, at least without seeing the website. And I guess a few have seen. And no one has sad anything about his website. Well, I guess I have to be the first then.
Industry: runner. WRONG! Google don't understand that you are about "running". Your domain is about fitness (which is a part of running yes). Then you are mixing crossfit, injury, etc into all of this. EXTREMELY bad user experience, and your categories is just all over the place. ALso, when you choose your keyword, you should try to be a bit smart about it: So if you started doing the keyword: domain.com/why-is-my-cat-blue because that has 800 searches a month.
You should not go after keyword such as:
domain.com/why-is-my-cat-purple
domain.com/why-is-my-cat-pink
Just because they have 200 searches each. Google is smart enough with similar keywords, and you should group them together 😉
Also, just because you have domain.com/sitemap in your url, don't mean that you are finished with the sitemap. You need to have a sitemap with urls too. So Google can find your urls, and you need to submit your sitemap in the Google Search console. My assumption is that you haven't set that up either since you don't got any urls in your sitemap. And the sitemap should be an own page (Yoast which I think has become bloated and a lot of use cases that is not needed, and this one which is only sitemap https://WordPress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/) and not along with your about page, contact us, privacy policy, etc. And btw, none of the links on your "look-a-like"-sitemap do not work. So basically, just another page on your WordPress with a bunch of letters. When I see this website as a runner, I think I'm going to run a away from this website. Cause nothing screams "damn! This is a nice to have a resource".
Normally I would say, that you are in a tough industry, and you should wait longer… but now that Iam seeing what you have done. I would say that nothing from what have said above here is going to help you. And if you did this after buying some course ASK FOR A REFUND!! Cause this is just BAAAD 🙁 🙁 What you have done above, using cash on links, and buying an expired domain is advanced stuff. And there is no guarantee that its going to work either 😉 So STOP BUYING MORE external tools, links, gadgets, shiny objects shit. Invest in knowledge. Go to udemy invest in a few different courses where they teach from the bottom, of how to setup a WordPress. Some proper basic onpage. And some decent keyword research.
Actually its not all that bad, cause you got some first page rankings. But what you are doing is driving a car with the handbreak on, where you have removed the 2 wheels. Yes, you are moving forward. But you will most likely never get to those mid comp keywords, and it if you get to some low comp keywords. The readers will run (cause why should they trust you where you have setup an about us page with no text). And this will take you twice as long time to get done.
So should you get rid of the domain? Not really (I'm a fan of "use what you got" till you get better), you can rank the website if you find a good enough low comp keywords where you compete with forums, blogspot and other web 2.0 websites. But you need to get your basic foundation straight first… Once you have the basic, you can use low comp keywords… do that over time, you can a TON of visitors just by using low comp keywords… and as time progress and you get a lot of visitors from those keywords, you can start going for the bigger terms with more monthly searches AND using links for those keywords (because many of those higher comp keywords need to have links in addition to internal linking for topical relevancy and internal power).

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