High-quality backlinks are some of the most important elements in boosting your search engine ranking–but even coming up with the best backlink-building strategy doesn’t guarantee your website’s rank will skyrocket overnight. Many often opt to use PBN hosting services in order to get effective backlinks.
Google’s indexing timeline can be a bit unpredictable, and can take anywhere from just a few days up to a few weeks.
What Is Backlink Indexing?
A search engine collects and organizes information of every web page it can find and their content. Google’s bots constantly scan the web to check for new web pages and update their database with new information.
They also check the links inside individual web pages and need to note their exact locations in order to properly organize this data. Then, Google stores those links in their database, and this process of storing, organizing, and updating links is referred to as ‘indexing’–even “dead” links get indexed.
After links are indexed, Google can assess them and decide their impact on rankings according to the pages they refer to and from. This is the basic concept that makes Google’s PageRank possible.
When Does Google Index Backlinks?
There isn’t any concrete answer to exactly how long Google takes to index a backlink. On average, it is between a few days and a few weeks, but this can vary depending on various factors.
Which Factors Decide When a Link Gets Indexed?
Quite a few things decide how fast your backlink gets indexed, including how frequently your site is updated, the quality of your backlinks, your overall page rank, and more.
Some other factors include:
- Link domain’s age–backlinks from older domains are more valuable and seem to get indexed faster
- Social shares of referring page–these increase your page’s authority, allowing your links to get indexed quicker
- Popularity of your website–popular (high-traffic) sites get indexed faster
- The diversity of your link source–if you’re getting backlinks from various websites, those links might get detected as unnatural and be indexed more slowly
How to Index Backlinks Faster
To get the most out of your backlinking efforts, make sure your pages are indexed quickly. Although it’s unclear how much effect a particular factor has on overall indexing speed, there are still a few things you can do to help speed things up a bit, such as:
Use the Google Search Console
Use your Google search console URL inspection tool to speed up your Google indexing; you can find information on a webpage’s index on Google. If you own the control over the backlinks on the website or can work with the website owner, you should submit the backlink to the URL inspection tool. This is the quickest path to indexing your backlink.
Ping Backlink URLs
This is an efficient way to make Google check and update your web page. After you ping the backlink URLs, Google will go through your web pages and check what’s new–if approved, Google will then index those pages.
There are plenty of pinging tools you can use, including:
- Ping-O-Matic
- Pingler
- Ping.in
- TotalPing
Share Backlinks on Social Networks
Sharing the backlinks on social networks is a fast and effective way to index them. Google indexes tweets in real-time, so this is a great place to post your backlinks. Google indexes backlinks from social media platforms like Pinterest, Linkedin, and Reddit–so be sure to post on these platforms to accelerate the indexing process.
Use Web 2.0 Sites
Creating web 2.0 backlinks is sometimes a great way to speed up the indexing process. Web 2.0 consists of various free-to-use platforms in which you can make free accounts and create content. Then, you can use those posts to share backlinks– for example, in a 1000-word article, you can add between seven and ten backlinks. This increases the number of credible backlinks on the web, allowing Google to index your backlinks much more quickly.
Use IndexNow
IndexNow is a ping protocol that notifies search engines when a site has been updated, automatically pinging the engine when a site has been changed or deleted. This allows the search engine to begin indexing backlinks swiftly.
While Google still hasn’t confirmed it adopted the IndexNow protocol, it has indicated that it’s in testing.
Buy Backlinks
Is buying backlinks allowed? Not in so many words. But, if you’re using the right backlinking strategies, you’ll fly under Google’s radar. If you’re using cheap, unsafe backlinking tools, Google may even lower your ranking and deindex your site.
Final Thoughts
Indexing backlinks can be quite challenging, especially because Google’s indexing methods are often unclear. The more effectively you can control the variables that impact the speed of indexing, the more quickly your backlinks will index. Using the tips above will help you increase the authority of your backlinks and speed up the overall indexing process.
Wondering if backlinks help YouTube videos? Check out our latest article.