Every other day I get an email that asks the age old question “what is the fastest way to get my backlinks indexed? I am building backlinks and I pinged them but they are still not showing on any backlink checker tools.”
It is true: you used to be able to ping a link and whoala, a day or two later that URL would show up in the Google search results. Not anymore though!
Search engines have evolved big time!
Can you imagine just how much data Google (or any search engine for that matter) would have to add to their searchable database on a daily basis if they were to show every single link they come across to their search audience? That concept just did not work anymore, which is why Google (and Yahoo!) stopped counting every link publicly.
This does not mean that Google doesn’t give you credit for all of your backlinks anymore, no. It simply means: just because Google crawls a link does not mean they will also show records of it when you search for it in their search engine.
The good thing is: it makes it harder for your competition to reverse engineer your SEO strategies.
The bad thing on the other hand is: it makes it harder for you to reverse engineer your competition’s SEO strategies.
Some people get so caught up with the number of links they have to their sites. I myself don’t care. Sure, it’s nice to see hundreds and thousands of quality backlinks to a site of mine, but frankly I don’t care whether or not the search engines tell me how many backinks I have.
In fact, the only thing that matters to me is “top ranking”. If a site does not rank #1 on Google for my keywords, I will continue building quality backlinks to it until it does. It is that simple.
One thing I do make sure of though is that Google crawls my backlinks. Heck, that is about the only thing I can make them do.
A “mass pinging tool” I created for my personal and business use (now available here) was designed to do just that: to take all my backlinks and turn them in to an RSS feed – which it would then push through pingomatic.com using unique IP addresses (check out my PingAutomatic WP WSO for exact details).
Does it work? You betcha!
Does it get my backlinks indexed? Sometimes. Sometimes not.
What it does for sure though – it gets all my backlinks crawled. It keeps presenting them to search engine spiders using unique visitor IP addresses which pretty much forces (in a good way) search engine crawlers to spider them. Whether or not search engines decide to show my backlinks in their search results is beyond me though. There is very little we can do about that – but we can always try, right?
I had someone email me recently saying “I ping the backlinks I build and they do not show up in the search results. Yet the backlinks I buy from you keep showing up in the search results. What are you doing differently Konrad?”
There are a few things you can do to try and get your backlinks indexed (as in: showing in the search results). It is still not a guaranteed way of making them show, but it does seem to help the process.
It’s simple really: First of, make sure that the backlinks pointing to your sites are of utmost quality. If the backlinks are of good quality (and on good quality sites), the chances of Google indexing them are greater. Secondly, build backlinks to those backlinks. This pretty much tells search engines that there is something special about the page where your site’s backlinks are on and it encourages them to index it.
Pretty straight forward really!
SIDE NOTE: Building backlinks to your backlinks is also a great way to drive lots and lots of link juice to your websites. I use this approach daily – it is effective and should not be overlooked.
Now, a lot of people disregard RSS feeds and say they have little to no value, but I strongly beg to differ. You have any idea how much Google spent to acquire feedburner.com (an established feed network site)? I doubt they would suddenly turn around and render the feedburner project “worthless” as far as SEO is concerned.
I am a strong believer in RSS feeds. I use them every day to help get my links and backlinks crawled. They work wonders if you use them right, but that is a topic for another time.
I hope this gave you some clarification on the changes taking place with the major search engines. Again, don’t worry so much about your backlinks not showing up on backlink checker tools. Just make sure that your backlinks get crawled by search engine spiders and move on to building more high quality backlinks.
Don’t get distracted by silly statistics. Instead, focus on what really matters!
