Backlinks are worthless if Google does not see them
Published by on September 25th, 2008
Link building is tough. Hours of leaving blog comments, persuading others to create a link, even purchasing links from other sites, takes a huge amount of effort for what seems to be little return. And that is precisely why all the major search engines put so much weight on the number and quality of links pointing at your site.
Every link must count
Link building effort, whether as a result of active placement of links yourself or by other sites organically lining to your great content, is impotent if the search engines are not aware of the page linking to you, and therefore not aware of the link. Most advice on link building you’ll find around the web, excludes one critical, additional task: ensuring pages that link to you are indexed in the search engines.
If you create the link yourself in whatever method, you will be aware of where that link has been placed - providing you are sensible and record the locations of your links, of course. But what about organic links, how can you discover where they have been placed?
Who links to you?
If a search engine already knows about a page that links to you, all is well and there’s nothing more for you to do. To discover which links fit into this category, simply perform a search in the following format: link:yourdomainhere.com. Every page returned will have within it a link to the domain you entered. But what should concern you are the pages that link but do not show from this search.
Logs, logs, logs
Whatever system you choose, whether it be visitor traffic logs provided by your web host, the free Google Analytics, or some other logging service, you should be able to access detailed lists of refers: where people came from when they visited your site.
Scour your refer logs and check every site you have not already checked (you’re keeping records, right?) to see if that page is in the search engine index. Do this by placing the entire page URL as a site search, like this: site:referdomain.com/page-that-sent-the-visitor.html. If no pages are returned, then that page is “unindexed”.
Linking out
The best way of letting a search engine know about a site or page is to create a link to it. When you discover an unindexed refer, link back, it’s as simple as that!
Where you place that link back might depend on the structure of your site, or you may want to place the link back on a completely different site to avoid direct reciprocal - or two-way - linking (managing non-reciprocal linking like this is a whole other subject and beyond the scope of this post). In its simplest form, create some kind of “Sites that link here” page, containing all the unindexed refers you have found.
Check them after a couple of weeks and if the page has found its way into the search engine, remove the link from your site.
Time and effort
Scouring through refer logs for unindexed pages may seem a troublesome task, but with the amount of effort needed to link build in the first place, it is vital to squeeze as much value from that effort as possible.
