Indexing Backlinks

The updates from March to May were pretty exciting for me. I’m one of those SEO nerds who lives and breathes this stuff—seriously, I even dreamed about keywords the other night. I know it’s a bit much.

I wanted to write this blog because I’ve noticed a lot of misinformation out there about backlink indexing. Some of it feels like someone Googled “what is indexing a page,” swapped out the word “page” for “backlink,” and called it a day.

But that’s not what you’ll find here. Instead, I’m going to dive into the data and share how we’ve completely revamped our link building workflow over the past six months. Just keep it on the down-low, though—we don’t want everyone copying us again!

What You’ll Learn in This Post:

• The Insights: Uncovering the Data Behind Our Link Indexing
• Mastering Link Indexing: Strategies That Work
• Checking Link Indexing: How to Ensure Your Links Are Indexed

The Insights

Any company that builds a large number of backlinks will tell you this:

“We don’t own Google and have no control over whether a link gets indexed.”

This is true, and it’s something I remind our clients of every week. But there’s always a “but.” A link builder can do a lot to influence whether a link gets indexed. The first step is ensuring that the site where you’re placing the link is indexed.

After the March update, we removed 1,045 websites from our marketplace because, as you might have guessed, they got deindexed from Google Search results. I’ll dive deeper into those findings another day, as we’ve uncovered some interesting insights.

Now, I’m going to share the real numbers—what percentage of our links each month didn’t get indexed on Google. We’re being completely transparent here, not just with our clients but with the public, because SEO is about sharing knowledge and learning together.

Yes, you read that right. We reduced the percentage of links we sold that didn’t get indexed on Google from 33% to 7%. Our goal is to get that number below 5%, which I believe would put us ahead of anyone else in the link-selling market. I’d even argue that our indexing rates could outperform PR links. And yes, it might surprise you to know that PR links often struggle to get indexed because the same article is typically republished multiple times. Why would Google bother indexing the same content repeatedly?

Here are some key findings from our review of 27,689 links:

• Large news websites had some of the worst indexing rates. Think of sites like USA Today and The New York Times. I found this surprising, but I suspect that with the sheer volume of content they produce daily, Google may selectively index backlinks it deems most relevant for search engines. I’ll explore the backlink indexing process more later.
• High cost didn’t always correlate with better indexing. This was unexpected. It seems that sites churning out massive amounts of content daily tend to have poorer indexing rates. This trend became even more noticeable after April, and I wonder if it’s connected to the surge in AI-generated content flooding the web.
• AI-supported content was indexed better than non-AI content—suggesting it might help index backlinks faster. This proves that quality content is quality content, regardless of how it’s created. I have a test site with no backlinks and 50 AI-generated web pages for a local business, and it’s performing exceptionally well.
• Multi-niche news websites continue to perform the worst—both in terms of getting deindexed and struggling to get posts indexed in the first place.
• Client-supplied content had a higher no-index percentage. In July, half of the 7% of links that weren’t indexed came from clients who provided their own content.

Mastering Link Indexing

You’re going to laugh at this, but guess what we changed? We started doing actual SEO. I know, groundbreaking, right? But it’s true. For every placement, we now do the following:

Keyword Research:

Before this change, we used to pick great topics without any real intent behind the content—pretty pointless in hindsight. Now, we focus on writing content with intent, targeting keywords that actually have traffic. Fun fact: Our links now rank for over 166,456 keywords, and that number is climbing every month.

Metadata:

We provide metadata, including page titles, H1s, and H2s, to our publishers and ensure they stick to it. This is a win-win for both the publisher and us.

Intelligent Recommendations:

We also use an intelligent recommendation system. This platform helps writers improve term frequency, optimize related keywords, and offer suggestions for sentiment, readability, word count, and more.

Supporting Links:

We recommend that our clients add supporting links. This involves getting the publisher to link old articles to the new content we’re creating.

We now apply these practices to all our links—and here’s the kicker: we don’t charge extra for it. We just wanted to build a better product, so we did. In business, you don’t always have to charge for everything.

Checking Link Indexing

There are two primary methods I use to check if a link is indexed, and the first backlink checker is completely free and straightforward. If you’re not already using Google search operators, you’re missing out on a wealth of valuable information.

The simplest way to see if a linking page is indexed is by using the `site:` operator in Google search.

The Second is to use a tool. Personally, I like using SE Ranking for bulk checking as it’s faster, and to be honest, it has the best data, and it’s cheap. This helps us with the indexing process. Here’s a rundown of how to do it in SE Ranking:

How to Find and Use the Index Status Checker

1. Click the Research icon in the side menu, then select Index Status Checker from the submenu.The results page will show you the indexing status of the URLs you specify. You can export this data in .XLS or .CSV formats.

   

2. Choose the search engine you want to check—Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
   Enter the list of URLs you want to check using the URL inspection tool or manually input them.
   

If you want to check if your website URL is in the search engine cache, check the relevant box and enter the website URL in the pop-up field.

Click Submit to start the check. Depending on the system’s workload, it can take up to 10 minutes.

By clicking “Yes” or “No” in the “In index” column, you will see the SERP for this URL. If you’ve specified a domain, the results will show all the search index pages for that website within this search engine. If you’ve specified the URL of a particular page, you will see information about the indexing status for this page only.

We’ve debunked the misconception that link builders lack influence over backlink indexing. Our team is always on the lookout for new strategies and tools that can give us and our clients that extra edge. By staying abreast of the latest trends, algorithm updates, and developments in the industry, we make sure we’re fully prepared to tackle the challenges of backlink indexing.

Summing Up

I’m incredibly proud of the work our team has done over the past six months, reducing our no-index rate from 33% to 7%. It’s a great feeling, and I hope it’s delivering even better results for our clients. We know there’s still more to do, and we’re continually working with our publishers to keep improving our product. As I’ve always said, the best business partnerships are those where everyone wins.

If you have any feedback or questions about this study, please feel free to reach out.