Topical authority for portfolios: how I'm ranking in 30+ countries

I rebuilt my portfolio in 2025 with one obsession: topical authority. Not backlinks. Not keyword stuffing. Topical authority — the Koray Tugberk Gubur framework that has been quietly winning in competitive niches for 4 years.

This post is the implementation. If you are a developer-freelancer trying to rank for "hire X developer in Y country", read on.

The Koray framework, simplified

Koray's idea (heavily simplified): Google ranks websites that demonstrate complete coverage of a topic through an expert source. You become the topical authority for "full-stack development from Pakistan" by:

1. Source context — one expert, one author, one voice across all pages.
2. Macro-context — central entity (full-stack dev) defined and reinforced.
3. Micro-context — every sub-entity (Next.js, Laravel, etc.) covered exhaustively.
4. Internal linking — every page links UP, ACROSS and DOWN.
5. Historical data — same author, lots of pages, consistent over time.

How I implemented it on this site

1. Single author, source-context everywhere

Every page on this site has a Person JSON-LD pointing to me. Same @id, same name, same image. Google sees one expert behind 1,200 pages.

2. The topical map

Full-Stack Dev (root)
├── CMS Development
│   ├── WordPress
│   ├── Shopify
│   ├── Webflow
│   └── ...
├── Custom Websites
│   ├── Next.js
│   ├── Laravel
│   └── ...
├── Mobile Apps
├── SaaS
├── Website Clones
└── ...

Each LEAF links to:
- ↑ Parent category
- ↔ 4 siblings
- → 4 country pages

Each COUNTRY page links to:
- → All 8 service categories
- ↔ Region siblings

This is encoded in data/topicalMap.ts and rendered by a <RelatedLinks> component on every page. No manual link maintenance.

3. Programmatic country pages

195 country pages from one template. Each one has:

• Unique title with the country name
• Unique description with capital + currency + local rate
• Country-specific FAQ (built from a function, not copy-paste)
• Hreflang alternates
• LocalBusiness JSON-LD scoped to the country

The trick: each page is genuinely different. Local rate. Local capital. Time-zone overlap math. The template is one file, the data drives the uniqueness.

4. Schema everywhere

• Organization + Person on every page
• BreadcrumbList on deep pages
• Service on service leafs
• FAQPage on FAQs
• BlogPosting on articles
• LocalBusiness on country pages
• AggregateRating on the home

Validation via Google's Rich Results test before every deploy.

5. Sitemap chunking

sitemap-index.xml → sitemap-services.xml, sitemap-locations.xml, sitemap-blog.xml. Each child is under 5,000 URLs. Google indexes them in days, not weeks.

What's actually working (60 days in)

• Indexed pages: 240+ of 250 (≈96%)
• Ranking keywords: 870 in top 100, 110 in top 10
• Country pages with traffic: 23 (mostly tier-1)
• Direct contacts: 14 (vs 2 in the previous quarter)

What's NOT working

• Tier-3 country pages are getting impressions but no clicks. Lesson: titles need more local hooks. I am rewriting them.
• Generic "Next.js developer" type queries — I rank but on page 2-3. The competitive moat is still high. More content + a backlink push needed.

If you want to copy this

Three things to start with, even if you skip the rest:

1. One author, one Person schema, every page. Source context first.
2. A topical map file that drives a RelatedLinks component. Mechanical interlinking beats manual.
3. Programmatic pages from real data. 195 unique pages > 5 generic ones.

The full implementation is open-source-ish — the code is here and the structure of this site is the demo. Want help planning your own topical map? Drop me a message.