Does TLD (.com vs .st) affect rankings in grey niche? Indexed but not ranking

Hey guys,


Got a grey niche site on a .st domain with decent backlink profile. Site gets indexed fine — pages show up in Google — but completely invisible in SERPs for target keywords. Showing up in limited regions only (US, Canada mostly).


Stats:

• Niche: grey zone
• Backlinks: decent profile, not spammy
• Indexing: yes, but limited regions
• Rankings: basically none, keywords not showing up at all

My theory is the .st TLD is hurting me. Google might be treating it as a regional/exotic domain and limiting its reach.


Questions for the crew:

1. Anyone running grey niche sites on non-.com TLDs? How's it working out?
2. Is .st known to have trust issues with Google vs .com/.net?
3. Worth the migration headache to .com or am I barking up the wrong tree?
4. Could this be a sandbox issue rather than TLD-related?

Ready to do a full migration with 301s if that's the consensus, just don't want to waste time if TLD isn't the actual problem.


Drop your experience below

TLD is totally irrelevant for rankings in 2026.

If you run ads, some people say that domains other than regular .com usually have a worse performance, but it's a while since i run ads for any tld other than .com. But when you talk about SERP and link building, from what i saw, it takes some time, even with link building, to properly appear on google. Also, the more the content context is a direct answer to what's being searched on google, the more the chances your serp will appear