Congratulations on acquiring backlinks for your site! Now it's time to make sure the investment pays off by getting Google to index your backlinks fast so you can reap the rewards of quality backlinks.
Here are 7 surefire ways that I use to get Google to index backlinks quickly. These methods help ensure your backlinks get indexed as quickly and accurately as possible.
Step #1: Give Google time to index your links naturally
I’m sure that the last thing you want to hear is that you should wait, but the truth is that if you are linking to quality sites and you have taken the time to write unique content for each one of the links you have built yourself, they will usually be indexed by Google within 15 days.
There’s no point in pinging your links if you haven’t given Google enough time to index them. Pinging them prior to this may raise a red flag and impact your link velocity.
In almost every case, we suggest waiting two weeks and then check to see which links haven’t been indexed before taking additional action. After this time, move onto checking the backlinks with the next step.
Step #2: Check to see which links have been indexed
The next step is to check to see which of your backlinks have been indexed and which haven’t. If you have only a few to check, you can paste the URL of the backlink into Google’s search box using quotation marks. If it has been indexed, you will see your link as a response to your search. If it hasn’t, you will get a message that looks like this:
- When searching for your Url, make sure to use exact match search using quotation marks.
If you have a large number of links to search, your best bet is to use a tool that will let you check them quickly.
Here are two to consider:
- Monitor Backlinks
- Scrapebox
Make note of any links that aren’t indexed.
If there are many, you may want to set up a Google Sheet so you can keep track of their progress and easily track them over time.
Step #3: Ping your backlinks
One of the reasons that people run into problems indexing backlinks is that the links they build are low quality. If you’re using popular sites like Blogger to build your links, Google will index them.
However, if you’re creating Web 2.0 sites or getting links from sites that Google considers to be low quality, they are not going to be crawled or indexed as quickly.
Tip: Even low quality links form a natural part of any backlink profile and have their place in helping to rank a site highly. You can circumvent this problem by using a service to ping your backlinks.
Basically, a ping is a notification that lets Google know that it’s time to re-crawl a particular site. One popular tool that works well is Pingler.
- Pingler allows you to ping and index backlinks fast for free.
Some people make the mistake of signing up with more than one pinging service. However, it's often unnecessary and can trigger a red flag for your site.
I suggest picking one quality service, add your URLs, and start to ping.
If you need to automatically ping Url's, then they have options for this as well. Pinging repeatedly is rarely going to result in significant rank changes, so your best bet is to ping once, give Google time to index your links. In the rare event that they have not been indexed within 3 days, ping again.
Step #4: Use a crawling and indexing service
Linklicious is a site that submits your URL's to Google for indexing. There is some debate about how effective this is, but it’s a good intermediary step to take if you’re not getting the results you want with pinging.
As was the case with pinging, you should choose one tool for this step and stick with it. Linklicious says that they will submit links to all of the main crawlers, including Google, Majestic, and Ahrefs.
Step #5: Make sure your links aren’t on No Index sites
One of the biggest mistakes that people make is assuming that every backlink can be indexed by Google. If you’re using sites that can’t be crawled and indexed, of course no amount of pinging is going to help. You can check individual sites using Chrome Inspect.
When using Chrome, right click and choose “Inspect” from the menu. This command will bring up the page’s source code. If you see “noindex” in the Head section of the code, your link cannot be indexed.
Alternatively, a free Chrome extension that can do this for you is NoFollow:
- No Follow helps detect whether backlinks can be indexed or not by searching for the NoIndex markup.
Keep in mind for this particular problem is that certain high-quality sites are indexed very frequently.
For example, sites like Blogger are a great place to set up your Web 2.0 sites. It’s a popular free blogging service with new pages being added constantly, and its high PageRank ensures that it will be crawled quickly.
Step #6: Backlinks to your backlinks
Building backlinks is one of the fastest ways to see rank improvements. Most marketers just focus on linking to their main site, without worrying about their other backlinks.
The result? Missed ranking opportunities for both the main site and the backlinks. Instead, you can build or even buy backlinks to your backlinks such as:
- Web 2.0 links such as Blogger
- Edu links on .edu domains
- Blog commenting
- Wiki links
- Question & Answer sites
While our SEO services can do all these at once, they can also be done manually by hand.
These Tier 2 backlinks will help ensure that you are both building your site authority while increasing your search engine rankings.
Step #7: Submit a sitemap to Google
Finally, if all else fails you can logon to Google webmaster and submit a sitemap.
The sitemap will let Google know that your site needs to be crawled:
- Click here for instructions how to submit your sitemap to Google.
After this has been submitted, you can expect the website to be crawled within 72 hours.
How to Index Backlinks Fast Summary
I hope this guide will help you next time you need to index your backlinks quickly. Remember, it's often best to wait some time for Google to index your backlinks naturally before proceeding to further actions such as pinging your links.
While building additional links to your backlinks (tier 2 links) may not be necessary, it is a recommended way to both boost site authority and potentially gain higher Google rankings.
So get cracking! Follow these instructions the next time you need backlinks indexed quickly.