Unindexed backlinks, do they still count?
I recently saw a comment on a blog that I cannot find to link back to, but basically it was suggesting that if you have a quantity of unindexed backlinks, most probably unindexed due to being on low quality sites, then they still count towards the ranking of your website. It started me thinking of situations that had me scratching my head for a while and realised that it is very likely to be true.
Have you ever soied on your competitors backlinks to see where they are getting their link juice from? Of course you have. We all want to beat our competitors and to do so means doing what they all do…but better.
How can unindexed backlinks help?
In fact I have no idea. I just believe it must be true because there have been occasions when a page has ranked highly in Google but only has a small number of backlinks showing in Yahoo site explorer. OK, the page might have a good PR but it is nearly always harder to beat their position than you would imagine.
Why is this? Does this have anything to do with unindexed backlinks?
I cannot help thinking that the reason for this is a large quantity of invisible backlinks pointing to a page that have not been indexed. They have been spidered by the ‘bots and so have been crawled by Google but for whatever reason, not indexed. This presents us with a difficult problem because if we cannot see how many backlinks a page has accumulated, then how are we ever going to know how to get above that page in terms of the quantity of backlinks one has to build?
The first answer to that question will spring to the lips (and fingertips) of all whitehat seo guys. Simply concentrate on getting quality links, not quantity. Yes, it’s true, and a variety of good PR backlinks from different sources and platforms will do a great job. The diversity of types of backlink will play an important role in ranking your pages too.
Perhaps it is not enough to simply use software like Seo Powersuite to send hundreds or thousands of emails to webmasters in the hope of getting some good backlinks. In the end, I have found it difficult to get any volume of answers to any email I have sent requesting link exchange on a one-way basis. You have to have something really juicy to tempt these people into adding your link to a page with dofollow and decent PR and a lot of us small free lancers do not have that available to us.
I think that the blackhat methods are dangerous and can end up risking everything, but perhaps here is where a little clouding is called for.
To that end, I see no reason why greyhat should be frowned upon. In other words careful and judicious use of blackhat tools to create backlinks from articles, forum profiles, social bookmarks and blog comments. Just as long as these tools are used to submit links in a manner unlikely to alarm Google, I see no problem with
When spinning articles to submit to a lot of directories just make sure you have a genuine unique article to begin with, write it yourself. It does not take long to put together a good quality article to use on your blog or submit to ezine. Always have the means to preview the spun articles and read them. If they read like crap then they will not be worth much, but if they are human readable then they will surely be indexed if sufficiently unique.
I can generate around 500 backlinks from every article I write, and providing I ping and RSS the urls, I am bound to get some indexed, but the majority will probably never be indexed. I am certain that they still help push me higher in the rankings though, just as automating a quantity of forum profiles and bookmarks once or twice a month can also be useful.
The only thing I really have a problem with is blog comments. It pays to find good blogs and pages with good PR, and it takes time to find them but the rewards are great. Having a dozen or so really good quality pages to leave your link on occasionally is a thousand times better than scraping thousands of blog pages and spamming a whole load of stuff to auto-approve blogs. These are possibly the weakest and worst type of backlink and should be avoided.
In conclusion, I have adopted a routine of building one-way links through distribution of spun articles on a weekly basis, a single profile blast every month, the same with bookmarks and the same with comments on blogs. I have never had any problems doing this, but then my niches are less competitive than some of them out there and so I’ve never been tempted to become several shades darker in terms of my hat. Grey seems to do me just fine.