When Search Engine Index Your Backlinks

Recently we have been receiving a lot of questions similar to this one:

“We checked backlinks, using different backlinks checker tools and we could not see links, which we bought on your website. Why we cannot see them there?”

The answer to this question is very simple. Those backlinks have not been picked up by those tools as they do not update their databases very often. Let’s take opensiteexplorer backlinks checker tool. They clearly state that they update their database every thirty days or even less often. The situation with Majestic SEO is a little bit better, but still they do not update their base very often too.

You also need to remember that their capacity is much less than Google’s and they simply might miss some of websites during their crawling process.

The most accurate tool out there would be would be Google Webmaster Tools, which can be found here: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. You can also try similar tool from Bing, as it is former Yahoo SiteExplorer and should be good for text links checking.

But even if you use all of these tools, backlinks do not appear their instantaneously. It takes time even for big boys to update their data.

But is you are still desperately want to make sure that your links are visible by major search engines, than give it one week or two, then go to Google and search for site:in it. Once you have found a page, which should contain your link in it and hover mouse over it, so a screenshot of the page appears on the right hand site, like this:

After that click on ‘Cached’ link, to see what Google has in their cache and when its cache was updated last time. You link will be definitely there if the cache has been updated after you had bought a backlink.

You might ask why it takes so long for the link to appear in Google’s cache. And the answer is very simple – ‘Panda’. Remember we wrote an article Google Panda Overview, where we gave a brief description of the new algorithm Google uses and what you should do to be compliant with it? As this algorithm is quite complex, Google does not update their database in the rush, but it takes time to carefully analyse all the pages and backlinks.

What we would advise you is not to rush and cancel backlinks you already have, but give them between two to four weeks to get indexed and then decide whether you want to remove them or not.

Another reason, why we would not recommend cancelling your links very often is that if backlinks to your websites appear and disappear very often, then it will not be good for your ranking as it will look suspicious for major search engines.

Just to finish this quick post, we would like to tell you, that we use our marketplace to promote websites for our clients and most of them are on the first page of Google for multiple keywords and they have been there for years now. What we do is occasionally add couple of links to keep them there. Even if a website, which has our backlink on it drops in PageRank, we still keep our links there as removing those would give a signal that something was wrong with that link, as this usually happens with link exchanged or bought links.

We also want to emphasize that we mainly use site wide text links or context links, including site wide context links. Over time these types of links proved to be the most efficient. The reason behind it is that if your link is surrounded by relevant text, it has more value. Another reason is, that site wide links have more value as it shows to search engines that there might be a good value in the referred website as the owner of this one decided to place a text link to it on all their pages.

This is it for today. So summarize all said we would say, buy relevant backlinks, try to use site wide and context links, including context site wide backlinks. Give it some time for your backlinks to get indexed. Do not cancel links too soon and do not do it as soon as PageRank of a page linking to your web site has dropped as this gives bad signals to search engines.

We hope this post has clarified some things for you. As before, we ask you for your feedback, so we can improve our services.