Backlinks Explained
Backlinks Explained
How To Be Sure Of The Effectiveness Of Your Back Links
For some time now, I have been getting quite concerned about the number of questions that I am receiving when it comes to backlink indexing. Many peope are building up mass backlinks, but not getting the desired results from them. Uncharacteristic as this may sound, it is a common occurence. I even had huge difficulties with this myself, but I managed to find out for myself that the issue is related to the indexing of backlinks.
Before I go too much further, I need to explain how this all works though. You see, if you generate a backlink, Google needs to be able to crawl that link in order for it to be aware of its existence. In that instance, if the backlink is on a page that is not indexed by Google, then it will not be able to be aware of its existance. This means that if you are building links, there are going to be a number of links that will sit within the depths of the web, never being discovered, rendering your efforts worthless.
To be able to solve this issue, you will need to understand a very interesting little function within the WordPress platform called “Pingbacks”. What this function does is quite simple. It listens to the web for any other websites that are linking to yours, and notifies you of these links as they appear. This occurs even before a page has been indexed in Google, which as you could understand, works very well in your favor.
As you would no doubt understand by now, if a link appears on a web page that is not indexed by the search engines, then it is going to carry no weight at all when it comes to how you rank. Keeping that in mind, I want you to consider how you can fix this issue. To be honest, there are a few simple solutions, each of which I will discuss with you now.
By simply submitting these pages to services such as Pingler, this can most definitely boost your indexing rate, as you will be notifying the search engines and other services of the existance of these pages. That said, this is not a 100% effective method, and should only ever be used if all else fails.
The other more powerful method that I use is a bit more complex, but quite powerful. By being a little creative, you can create a custom RSS feed of your pingbacks using RSS mash technology (as it is referred to), and submit these feeds to some popular RSS directories. The benefit of this method is that you will, in effect, be building links to the pages that are linking to you, which works in two ways. It builds the importance of these pages, plus it also indexes them so that the search engines can be made aware of the links that are pointing to your site.
The method that I personally use is a bit easier than the last. I use custom plugins and scripts to mash these RSS feeds together, and submit them to directories in the background, saving me the time of either doing this myself, or outsourcing it. Some of these scripts will even social bookmark these pages, which is also extremely handy.
Lets not forget that you can also manually build links to these pages, however this is labor intensive and only ever recommended if you are taking your SEO campaign to the next level. This process is frequently referred to as “promoting the promoters” and can deliver some extremely good results. However, at the end of the day, if you want your backlinks to carry some kind of weight in the search engines, be sure to get them indexed using one of the methods outlined here. Without this, you are going to suffer the results of at least 30 – 40% of your work going down the drain, and a very low backlink indexing rate.