Author: AffordableSEO

Page indexing and link indexing are important topics in SEO and are  often overlooked and misunderstood by beginners. Indexing can be a critical step in link building and is also important for your website.

Before reading this post, we would suggest to read our blog  what are backlinks to have some better context.

 

WHAT IS LINK INDEXING  |  INDEXING AND CRAWLING

 

For Google, the whole process starts by crawling:  bots, called  googlebots,  crawling the web for pages. Google has different bots  for mobile, desktop, video, photo, news.

After crawling the pages are rendered and finally, if content is worthy  for Google, added to the index. The process is not as straightforward as it seems….

New content is indexed faster when linked to published content. That is why orphaned pages are difficult to index.

Google has two separate indexes (primary and secondary) which are the desktop index and the mobile index.

in 2016, Google announced that the primary index was switched from desktop to mobile. This was done to reflect the trend that most searches were now done with mobile phones. You can check this by yourself by looking at your website’s Google analytics.

A consequence of this change is that mobile search results are slightly different than desktop search results.

This also means that mobile search results reflect more quickly changes being made to your website.

Indexing is the process by which google extracts the most relevant information and adds them to the index. When you execute a search, Google displays the best information based on the index. The index is similar to a library where billions of web pages are stored and organized. Actually, Google’s index size is not as big as we might think….. As many pages on the internet are spam or do not carry useful information the goal for Google is have the best index possible and not the largest.

It was confirmed recently that Google does not crawl the whole content of a website  and therefore index  a limited number of pages (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-not-indexing-site/416717/)

These information  about indexing are now displayed on your google search console as pages discovered but not indexed. Content can be crawled and indexed later, or not….

 

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE | LOOKING FOR INDEXING ISSUES

 

Google search console is a powerful tool to check if you currently have indexing issues with your website. On the left handside you will found the Index–> coverage section.

Pages that Google did not include in the index, are presented in different categories:

Redirect error

Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag

Crawled – currently not indexed

Page with redirect

Alternate page with proper canonical tag

Not found (404)

Discovered – currently not indexed

Soft 404

Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user

Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical

 

CAN MY BACKLINKS BE INDEXED?

The first thing to check is  if the robots.txt file allows bots to visit the page. If robots are blocked from crawling pages with the disallow command, the message below will be displayed by Google mobile-friendly test. If a page is blocked, it can neither be crawled nor fetched by robots.

 

Once you have made sure that a page can be crawled, you have to check if this page does not have a noindex tag.

The noindex  tag will prevent a page to appear on Google search results.

As you can see on the screenshot below, a page with the no-index can still be crawled and fetched by  Googlebot smartphone.

HOW TO INDEX BACKLINKS | WHAT ARE INDEXERS?

Link indexing is a task that is getting more and more difficult in 2021 and 2022  for SEO agencies and freelancers. Numerous threads of complaints of low success rate can be found in SEO forums. What took days to index before can take weeks now. We experienced our first difficulties in indexing links back in February 2020 and it did not get better in 2021 and 2022, far from it….

To increase indexing rates, some people have developed indexers. Indexers are platforms built by a third party to force the indexing process. Few of them are free, and as expected, have a low success rate. In 2022, you can find more than 10 paid indexing services on the marketplace  which have different indexing rates.
Indexers  usually propose monthly packages to index thousand of links but can work also with  a more flexible credit system if you have to index a small amount of links over few months. Sending a link to an indexer costs between 0.01 and 0.02 USD.

 

WHAT IS LINK INDEXING  |  INDEXING AND DEINDEXING

It is not because a link has been indexed that it will stay indexed forever. We noticed on few occasions that links were being deindexed by Google.
Few reasons can come to mind to explain this: either links were not well connected or Google finally considered that these links were not relevant and not worth being in the index.
It is also possible that the hosting platform where the backlinks are decided to add noindex tags. It was the case for the publishing platform Medium which started implementing the noindex tag in the first half of 2021.

 

DO BACKLINKS NEED TO BE INDEXED TO PASS POWER?

Getting webpages crawled and indexed is very important so  they can appear on search results and start getting organic traffic and  conversions.

For parasite SEO, indexing is a key  step as the goal is to have your parasite showing up on the SERP.

For backlinks, is indexing as important as webpages and parasites?

As we discussed before, backlinks are important in SEO. One much debated topic in SEO forums and groups is if do-follow backlinks need to be crawled or fully indexed to count for SEO e.g pass power.

Many think that backlinks need to be fully indexed to pass power to the money website. A minority seems to  think that getting backlinks crawled by bots is enough.

Finally some think that links crawled by bots counts for SEO but as not much  as the ones fully indexed.

 

 

HOW DO I CHECK IF MY PAGES OR LINKS ARE BEING INDEXED?

 

If you do not want to wait for your links to appear on Google Search Console, Semrush or Ahrefs dashboards, you can check links one by one by performing one of the three searches below on Google:

http://www.link1.com (leads to broader results)

inurl:http://www.link1.com

site:http://www.link1.com

This technique is not always precise as sometime a link do not show up on google search but does on Ahref or Semrush.

When you want to check the  backlinks of your money site or another page, you will notice some differences between Semrush and Ahrefs so it is good to use both.

If you have a list to check, zenserp has a free Google Index Checker Tool and gives some decent results.

Another index checker  by Linkody  is Index Checkr which has a paid version to check links in bulk for as low as $0.0011 per check.

 

HOW FAST MY NEW CONTENT OR LINKS CAN BE INDEXED?

 

Web pages can take few hours, days or even weeks to get indexed. Your content will be approved very fast  if your website is Google News approved, . To speed up the indexing process you can request bots to visit your pages via Google Search Console but results are not guaranteed.

As mentioned earlier, indexing backlinks is more difficult than indexing your web pages and SEO indexers are widely used for this purpose  .We noticed that indexing issues on Google were linked to Google updates. SemRush has a useful tool called Semrush sensor which measures the SERP’s volatility and therefore an indication of Google updates (even non announced). If volatility is high, it is likely that indexing remains  difficult so it is better to wait until the volatility index comes down to send links to your favorite indexer.

In this blog we will  discuss backlinks and why are they so important for SEO in 2021. After some general considerations, we will focus on backlinks  created by links insertion. If you want to read about other modes of  acquisition I would recommend to read the article of Backlinkto about backlinks.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are  inbound links (hyperlinks)  to a  website or page.  Hyperlinks  were developed at the very beginning of the word wide web and used to navigate  the web before the existence of search engines. Backlinks are  also used by  web crawlers  to discover new content.

Why  backlinks are important |  Page Rank Algorithm

Crawling,  indexing and displaying content in a relevant  way is very challenging task  and even if it is not perfect,  Google is leading the way as the most used search engine today.

The page-rank algorithm patented by the future CEO of Google, Larry Page, was strongly based on  backlinks to display relevant content on search engines.

As stated on US patent US6285999B1  Method for node ranking in a linked database,  page-rank interprets  a link from a page A to B as a vote by page A to B for content relevancy.

If page A is very authoritative (has a high page rank) it will increase the ranking of page B on search results.

Although it is difficult to say how much of the  original page rank algorithm remains in today Google’s algorithm,  backlinks are still  an important ranking factor.

What are Backlinks | Do-follow and no-follow backlinks

It is very important when doing link building to differentiate   between a  do-follow backlink  and a  no-follow backlink. Do-follow links contrary to no-follow,  pass authority to the destination page and therefore  increase its ranking  on Google.

No-follow links were setup in 2005 by Google to fight against spam and ranking manipulation. In 2020, Google decided to change the reading of no-follow as a hint rather than a directive. It is therefore advisable to have a mix of do-follow and no-follow links in your backlink profile.

You can check if a link is  no-follow by opening checking the page source code with your browser and look for the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag (it is placed after the attribute href).

Google recently introduced new attributes: rel=”sponsored” to be used for advertisements and paid links and rel=”ugc” for user-generated content links such as comments and forum posts.

As quoted by Google, “Links marked with these rel attributes will generally not be followed” but these links can still be crawled.

After a backlink campaign using quality  do-follow backlinks,  we always see an improvement of page ranking especially for long tail keywords. Backlinks can be directed to the homepage, a product page or a blog article.

Sometime you can see the attribute rel= “noreferrer” on a do-follow link. It just means that Google Analytics will not show any info about from the referral traffic, it will be classified as direct traffic.

 

You might see also the attribute rel= “noopener” which is used more as a safety net to avoid malicious attack on opening windows (target=”_blank”)

What are Backlinks |Profile and Contextual Backlinks

A profile page,  like its name indicates, is a page with one of more  link added on it.  Sometime a link can be surrounded by a large amount of text up to  several thousand words but there is no anchor text.

Depending on the page design,  other links can be present (on the footer or  menu) and therefore can dilute the power of the page.

A page with contextual backlink(s) can have many links with anchor text and in some cases, pictures and videos can be inserted as well. A blog  is a good example of a webpage with contextual links in which  visual content can be added.

 

What are Backlinks | Backlinks indexation

Backlink generation is a tedious work but once a backlink is live, it has yet to be crawled and indexed  by search engines. Indexation can be the bottleneck for backlink generation. It is a difficult task and a somewhat controversial topic  which we will discuss in another blog post.

What are Backlinks | How to measure  backlinks quality

When Google stopped using the page rank metric, other companies filled the void and developed their own metrics to measure domain and page authority.
Link building providers are using these metrics to market their services, with the different acronyms below:

DA/PA:  domain and page authority (Moz metrics)

DR/UR: domain and url ratings (Ahrefs metric)

TF/CF: trust flow and citation flow (Majestic metrics)

DA/PA are probably the most commonly used metrics on SEO marketplaces.

However, these metrics  can be easily manipulated (you can find plenty  of SEO services to artificially increase your DA/PA). It is therefore important to have more metrics  to measure the quality of a backlink.

Additional metrics to look at are: number of backlinks and  domains connected to the page, number of  organic keywords for which the domain or subdomain are ranking for.

It is important to get a rough idea about the organic traffic on the domain or subdomain and to know about the geographic origin of the traffic. For all these metrics, we  recommend to use Semrush.

How do I check backlinks to my site?

With time, on top of  backlinks created by you or a SEO agency, you have probably earned few backlinks you did not know about. It is not uncommun especially if you have unique content on your site that people are linking to you.

The first option you have to check backlinks to your website  is to look at the links section of  your Google Search Console. However you will find out that not all of them are there.

Another option is look up for backlinks using Ahrefs free backlink checker. However, the free version is limited to the top 100 backlinks.

For a limited time, the backlink analytic section of Semrush is free with no limitation in the number of backlinks. You can access it by clicking the image below. You can also with these tools analyze  the backlinks of your competitors as well.

You have probably come across the term parasite SEO in forums wondering  what it was all  about and maybe you saw these peculiar webpages ranking  on the  page 1 of Google ahead of very authoritive websites.

What is parasite SEO ?

Parasite SEO, also referred sometime as parasite hosting or barnacle SEO, is the process of ranking a page  attached to a domain, taking advantage of its high authority on Google and hence able to rank with some keywords relatively easily without having a website.

How can I use a parasite page ?

 

As a landing page for affiliate marketing.

As  a buffer page  to increase  organic traffic to your website.

As an entity for Brand management.

Not all  parasites are equals

 

Parasites are not all equals in the eyes of Google. Some can rank higher than others and some live longer. Third party metric from Moz, Semrush, Ahref or Majestic   can give some hint about the potential  of a parasite.

Domain authority, trust flow, number of inbound links (backlinks) and organic traffic can be indicators. However you will sometime see pages which are ranking very well with a low authority and not many inbound links.

Do keywords ranking change with google regions when using parasites?

 

Yes. Like with a normal website, keywords  ranking depends on  the google region. We noticed that a japanese parasite was doing better in google.jp  compared to google.com. It is our experience also  that a parasite hosted in France was ranking  better in google.fr  regardless the language  used  (French or English).

 

NO INDEX META TAG, THE PARASITE KILLER

 

Sometime parasites are short lived as they get quickly being taking over or blasted by spam. Site owners can take some measures such as  making the page not public. However the real killer is the noindex tag which will prevent the parasite page to be displayed on Google search  results.

Can a parasite  can also be a backlink?

 

It depends  if some links can added to the page and if these links are marked as do-follow or no-follow. For a backlink to work and pass some SEO juice links have  to be do-follow. Of course it is better if link can be contextual e.g surrounded by relevant text. Therefore parasites can be integrated in a link-building campaigns.

Does parasite SEO work in 2021?

 

Parasite SEO is nothing new and has been around for more than 10 years. Every year people are asking if parasite SEO is still working. So  yes, parasite SEO still does work in 2021 but it is probably more work then few years ago like many aspect of SEO in general. Will it still work in 2022? Probably yes.

You will see some parasites  more on the first page of Google than Bing.  For the same queries, it is looks like Bing does a better job as filtering results so parasite SEO is probably a less effective strategy on Bing.

Best Parasite SEO Platforms

 

Thousand of domains are available to do parasite SEO , the most famous ones being Medium and Google Sites. Some web 2.0 like Tumblr can be used as well. Some social media platforms like Instagram can be used as parasite as well.

Can onpage SEO be done on a parasite hosting ?

 

It actually depends on the parasite platform. Some basic onpage can be done on Google Sites with tags (H1,H2, H3). Videos from Vimeo and Youtube can be embedded as well. In some platforms, on page SEO can be limited and in for some not possible at all.

Is barnacle SEO a black hat or a white hat technique?

Create a story on your medium account or on a google site connected to your gmail  obviously belongs to White Hat SEO.  It  is considered Black Hat SEO when a website is hacked and pages published  and pdf uploaded on the server without the consent of the owners.

 

Barnacle  SEO  pro’s and con’s

Pro’s

Can rank on page one of google even for  some competitive keywords in a matter of days or weeks.

Most of the time good  parasites ranks by themselves and do not require link building.

Most of them are free.

They can be used for any niche.

Con’s

Life span: some parasites can be taken down at any time by the platform owner or by a third party.

It is our experience that some parasites like Medium are  not stable in the SERP: being on page 1 for few weeks and then gone  completly before coming back to page 2.

It is time  consuming  to manage and maintain a pool of parasites.

Web design is  often  limited.