Indexation: the final frontier of backlinking. Or, at least the last step, and sometimes the most frustrating.
You’ve spent hours (or dollars) on a great link building strategy and you’ve done everything right. How long will it take to show returns? Why aren’t your backlinks showing up yet? What can you do about it all?
The ultimate, broadest answer is that Google will do what it wants as always, and sometimes you run into some outliers that you just can’t solve. Don’t worry though, this shouldn’t happen often.
In fact, there’s a lot you can do to help with indexation. Let’s dive into a few of the methods we use at Invalley with our Monthly Mix packages.
First off, how long does it take backlinks to index?
There’s no right answer here, it depends on a lot of factors. The first thing you should know is that it is not uncommon for links to take up to 5-10 weeks to rank and start impacting your site.
That said, that is a more extreme example, and there’s a lot you can do to speed it up. Before I get there though, there’s a few things you need to consider.
If you’re a newer site, it will probably take you longer to see things indexing. Tangentially, even if you have an older domain, if you have a minimal backlink profile, again, you might see some stagger there.
It’s important to know that in many cases, SEO is a strategy you work on monthly, and more often quarterly, not daily or weekly, especially at first.
Circling back though, it genuinely isn’t all doom and gloom on this front. There is a lot you can do to help out indexation.
Build Tier 2 Backlinks
As I mentioned in our nofollow link article, tier 2 backlinks can be immensely valuable for passing DA, even when your primary backlink is a nofollow. Well, they’re also pretty valuable for indexation.
Let’s say you build a link on a great forum that has dofollow links, and you can’t seem to get it ranking. Building contextual links (as always, within high quality content) pointing to that forum post helps to build the “link network” that Google loves to see. It also helps to get things ranking more quickly.
Build links on high quality domains and websites.
Our links at Invalley, especially for the premium links, tend to rank very quickly, often in days to a couple of weeks (a lot more quickly than the common 5-10 weeks).
To put it bluntly, our premium links are being built on domains with a huge backlink profile, a ton of domain history, high DA, and low spam scores. These sites are going to get crawled more quickly, and much in the same way that they’re incredibly powerful for DA, they’re incredibly visible too. You’re going to see high quality guest post links ranking more quickly than your first Quora link.
Get into Google Search Console, and submit your site for indexing.
This is a pretty simple one to follow. If you don’t have Google Search Console yet, get it. If you do, submit your sitemap for indexing if it hasn’t been crawled recently.
This isn’t the be-all-end-all solution it might seem like. There is no reason to believe that doing this every time is going to result in a vending machine-like effect of coin in, indexation out. That said, it can and does help.
I like to do it every time we post a new article or I notice some new backlinks.
Get sharing on social media!
Don’t go crazy; you may not hurt your SEO but you’re not going to impact your indexation by sharing the article that just linked to you 100 times.
That said, make a habit of sharing articles you wrote or received a feature in to your personal pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever makes sense.
Personally, I wouldn’t spend money directing an entire prospecting campaign to another website that I can’t monetize or retarget from, but you could sponsor a post to get some visits and social proof from it as well. Make it work in your holistic strategy!
Should you use pings or other indexation tools?
The best piece of advice I can offer you is that if it seems automatic or easy, it’s probably not going to help and can likely hurt. A lot of people swear by pings, indexation tools, and the like. I haven’t seen tangible results that I was confident were 100% safe from potential penalties, which means I avoid these types of solutions.
Just keep in mind that if it ends up hurting you in the long run, it’ll take longer to recover than it will if you exercise some patience and get your links to rank.
Want to make sure all your links are noticed by Google? Our Monthly Mix package includes both premium guest posts and tier 2 links to help search engines notice those posts. We also keep track of how many links have been indexed. We’ll take action whenever indexation takes too long.
