If you haven’t been making an effort to get your backlinks indexed, I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you.
The bad news: As few as 2% of the backlinks you’ve been building are actually indexed and helping you rank.
The good news: If most of your backlinks aren’t indexed, you can get more indexed and increase your ranking without any additional backlnking.
If you’ve been building profile links, 2% indexation could be a very real possibility for you which is why you’ll definitely want to spend some time getting as many indexed as you can. Web 2.0 properties such as Blogger and social bookmarks naturally have a much higher indexing rate, but they can still be greatly improved. Regardless, if it isn’t already a habit of yours, you should make a point to record every URL where you place a backlink. This way, you can come back later to get it indexed, and back again and again if it’s stubborn 😛
There are two ways to categorize the methods for getting your backlinks indexed.
1. Pinging
2. Building Backlinks to your Backlinks
The first method, pinging, is very simple and efficient. In case you’re not familiar, a ping is basically just a notification to search engines and blog directories that new content has been added to a site. It’s worthwhile to ping every backlink you make since it takes such a little amount of time. Just head to pingomatic.com and enter a title and URL.
However, pinging cannot be relied upon on its own. It simply isn’t effective enough for indexing backlinks at the rate we desire. We want RESULTS! This is why we initiate the second method of increasing indexation:
Backlinks to Backlinks (BL2BL)
This might seem like an arduous and extremely time consuming task at first consideration, but it doesn’t have to be. Right away, we want to eliminate any backlinking techniques or strategies that cannot be scaled and completed quickly. As stated earlier, social bookmarks and web 2.0 properties enjoy high natural rates of indexing, and both of them can be used efficiently. Social bookmarks specifically are very quick to create and only one or a few to each backlink will do wonders for the indexing rate of your backlinks. Google’s have spiders that basically live on sites like digg, crawling non-stop which is why bookmarks get indexed so well. When these bookmarks get indexed, the web page on the other side of the link gets indexed too.
Despite the quickness with which you can make social bookmarks with free tools like socialmarker.com or paid tools like Bookmarking Demon, there are still other efficient ways to index your backlinks. Rather than using many quick to create backlinks, you can harness the power of one powerful authority link.
One high PR authority backlink can be great for your site for many reasons. One of which is that it will be crawled quite often which means your site will get crawled more often as a result. We can use this to our advantage by pointing just one authoritative backlink to a page filled with our backlinks. Just place a page somewhere on a web property of yours filled with backlinks you need indexed and get that single authoritative link. Perhaps the best part about this method is that you can cycle out backlinks and rinse-and-repeat your indexing.
Neglecting indexing is a sure-fire way to keep yourself off of page #1. If Google doesn’t know about your backlinks then they won’t be ranking your site any higher. Make sure you keep records of your backlinks and take the time to get the results from them that you’re looking for. Take control of your backlinks – don’t leave indexing backlinks to Google.
Guest Post by Ben Jackson, an SEO expert and enthusiast, and founder of www.seodiscovery.org.