Step by Step Guide: How to Get Backlinks Indexed
Backlinks are an important part of SEO. Without them, you would struggle to get your web pages ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). After all, every high-quality, authoritative backlink you earn pointing towards your website content acts as a little vote of confidence for Google, meaning you stand more of a chance of climbing towards the top of results. For all of this to happen, your backlinks need to be indexed. Just like how Google won’t show your web pages in search results if they aren’t indexed, you won’t reap the benefits of building backlinks if they’re not indexed either.
The thing is, backlinks can take an awfully long time to be registered in Google’s index, which means that it could be a while before you see the results of your link building efforts. The good news is that our clever guide on how to get backlinks indexed is here to help you. This helpful resource will talk you through everything you need to know about backlink indexing, how long it takes, and the steps you can follow to make the process a whole load quicker!
Understanding Backlink Indexing
Backlink indexing is when search engine bots crawl the web and find new backlinks, adding them to their search index. During the crawling process, the bots will follow all of the internal and external links on the page, and the new ones will be indexed. How often search engine bots crawl a website depends on many things, including content quality, domain authority, site structure, and page loading speed.
How Long Does It Take For Backlinks To Get Indexed?
With so many factors going into how often bots crawl websites, it means that there is no hard and fast rule when it comes to how long do backlinks take to get indexed. It could take a few days or even months for a backlink to end up in Google’s index.
Focusing on the following areas when link building could help Google index your backlinks more quickly:
- Crawl Frequency: Google tends to crawl websites that are updated frequently or seen as having more authority more often.
- Authoritativeness and Relevance of Site: Backlinks coming from websites in your niche that have authority are more likely to be indexed quickly.
- Site Health: Make sure the sites where your backlinks are coming from are fully optimised for SEO and have a good linking structure.
- Domain Age: Older domains are crawled more frequently than new ones.
- Sources of Links: Links coming from quality sites, and a wide range of them, are more likely to be indexed than those achieved from dodgy link building practices.
How To Get Backlinks Indexed Fast: Step by Step Guide
As well as concentrating on the types of websites where your backlinks are coming from, there are some other steps you can take to get your backlinks indexed promptly. Below, you will learn how to index backlinks fast so you can take advantage of the benefits in the SERPs.
Step 1: Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool
If you want to know how to index backlinks fast in Google, you need to be using Google Search Console (GSC). Its URL Inspection Tool can help you get your backlinks indexed, but you’ll need to know the webmaster of the website that is linking to you. Presuming you have this, simply:
- Enter the URL of the backlink into the URL Inspection Tool and press enter for it to be inspected.
- Select ‘Request Indexing’ which will trigger Google to recrawl the page and index your backlinks.
Step 2: Post on Social Media
Sharing your backlinks to social media is an excellent way to speed things along when wondering how to get backlinks indexed. Sharing your backlinks to the likes of LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, and Reddit is a smart way to go, as Google indexes these posts in real time. So if you share your backlinks to X, for example, Google will immediately take notice and crawl this. Obviously, Google can’t index every post on X, but by encouraging audience interaction through likes, shares, and replies, there is more of a chance of those backlinks getting indexed.
Step 3: Use Third-Party Backlink Indexing Tools and Services
Using a third-party backlink indexing tool like ours here at linkindexer.io is another effective way to get your backlinks indexed fast. When you upload your backlinks, these tools handle the rest, alerting Google that a website has undergone changes that need to be crawled and indexed ASAP.
Step 4: Post Backlinks To Your Own Website
This one might not seem obvious, but another way to help index those backlinks is to post them to your website. If you’re using GSC’s URL Inspection Tool, you need to know the webmaster who created the backlink in the first place. If you don’t know this, a workaround is to post a backlink on your own site and then use the URL Inspection Tool to request indexing in the same way so it can be discovered by bots and indexed. Once complete, you can remove the link from your site to keep your linking structure clean.
Step 5: Get Your Backlinks From High Authority Sites
If you take a broad approach to building backlinks from any old website, then it is unlikely that this will do your backlink profile, let alone indexing, any good. When building links, always focus on getting them from high-authority sites that are relevant to your industry. Sites that are well-established and carry authority are on Google’s radar a lot more and are indexed very quickly, sometimes even straight away. As well as this, any content that contains a link to your site needs to be high quality and bring value to the user. Combining these two elements in your link building approach will likely get you indexed quicker.
Summing Up: How To Get Your Backlinks Indexed
Link building is a vital aspect of SEO and climbing up the SERPs. However, it’s one thing to build links and another thing entirely to ensure that they’re getting indexed, as it’s only then that you’ll see any reward from your efforts. If you’re building links from quality, relevant websites while focusing on the points mentioned above, you are much more likely to get indexed quickly and reign supreme in the results pages.