Difference Between Building Backlinks and Indexing Backlinks

Difference Between Building Backlinks and Indexing Backlinks

“I cannot find my Links! You guys promised to Build 4000 backlinks but I can only see 1200 in my SEO Tool. Where are the others?”

If you are an SEO professional or work in an SEO Agency, you might be familiar with these types of queries from your clients. They are obviously right in their perspective since they simply don’t understand how Search Engines create and process backlinks.

backlink indexing and link building

A Brief Introduction To Indexing

Google is a search engine and the search engine maintains its own database of all the content on the Web which they call the “Index”. Whenever a website or more accurately, “a page is published” it is not automatically reflected in any position in the SERPs. It has to be crawled by Google crawlers and indexed in the database before it can even be found in the SERP. 

Here’s how you can check the number of indexed pages in your website using the site: operator. 

So if you have published a new blog or page, you may not see that page in the SERP. Here’s how it looks: 

How to Get Indexed in Google?

There are basically two ways:

Search Console 

In Search Console, you can index any url using the URL Inspection Tool and request for Indexing. It shows whether the url is indexed or not.

The drawback with this technique is that you can only request 1 url at a time for indexing.

Using Screaming Frog SEO Tool and Search Console Sitemap

You can crawl all your site pages using Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool and create a manual sitemap using the sitemap feature. After adding this site to the root directory of the website, you can submit it to Google search console for indexing.

Using the Indexing API

Google has launched its own indexing API. You can add the Google Developer project as a user in Search Console and can run the program using Python. It allows instant indexing of 250 urls every time the API is invoked.

However, with multiple Developer accounts, we can easily increase that limit.

You can learn about it more > https://thatware.co/google-indexing-api-python/

This is the best technique for indexing as the process is instantaneous, while in the previous cases, you merely request Google for indexing.

A backlink is just a link from one site to another. Google has confirmed that it discovers more content by crawling links existing on the crawled pages. Hence, it is recommended to maintain a proper interlinking structure of your website.

Hence, submitting a backlink to an external website is not automatically shown in any SEO Tool or web crawling tool, since most SEO Tools fetch their data from Google itself.

So you might have to wait for the next crawl cycle of that particular website, in order for your backlinks to be crawled. Large websites not optimized for SEO may have a poor crawl budget; hence, building backlinks on such websites may take longer to index.

Backlink Created Successfully

Backlink Parent Page not Indexed

This why you can see variations in the backlink count that is submitted to the external websites and the backlinks that are indexed in Google that show up in any SEO Tool crawl.

Rest assured all submitted backlinks will get eventually indexed by Google, it is only a matter of time before they do.

If you are a business person currently hired by an SEO agency or a professional, then don’t be demotivated just yet. There is a secret technique to improve index Backlinks quickly and make sure those are reflected in the Google SERP. 

Can you guess it?

It’s again the Google Indexing API. But isn’t it only run through a search console, one would wonder how it can be used to crawl external websites.

There is a simple trick for doing it. Search Console allows you to add not only website property but Google properties as well. 

  1. Create a Property in Blogger or Google Sites.
  2. Take a list of all the Live Links from the Backlink Sheet from your SEO Team, and put it in an organized manner on that page.
  3. Publish that page and take the published URL in the excel sheet.
  4. Invoke the Indexing API using Python. (Know the steps here > https://thatware.co/google-indexing-api-python/
  5. Check your Backlink Score in your preferred SEO Tool.

The total number of referring pages (backlinks) instantly shot up. Using the Indexing API, is really helpful and can have an instant impact on your off-page efforts for your SEO campaign.