Backlinks are the lifeblood of a well-structured site. They help you generate more traffic, improve your brand prestige and rank higher in search engines. But, as with any other aspect of SEO, you need to do your research before you collect and index links.
Index Links: Why Do Backlinks Matter?
Backlinks are one of the best ways to get better search engine rankings. Search engines like Yahoo, Google, and Bing are all link-based search engines and crawl through thousands of websites on the Internet to catalog their content and display them as search results to their users. Search engines love internal links because they think of them as a vote of confidence.
When established sites link to pages on your site, it tells Google that they are confident that the page they are linking to deserves a good ranking. The more links you have, the more likely you are to get good search rankings.
However, a lot of entrepreneurs complain that their backlink campaigns aren’t getting the desired results. Companies through away massive marketing budgets only to realize that their backlinks aren’t being indexed by search engines.
They make errors that lead to Google penalizing their sites. Learn some of the mistakes that can jeopardize your whole running and how link-building services can help you fix them.
Unnatural Link Building
If you have thousands of links pointing to your site within a very short time frame, Google algorithms will realize that something is fishy. Artificial link building is achieved through links created by spammers and scrapers or by purchasing them from low-quality sites. Google does not like unnatural link building and penalizes sites that do so.
If you want to get better rankings, there is no shortcut. You need to invest time to build them naturally. Find sites that are authoritative and pitch them an idea for a guest blog. Think of domain authority like a game of darts. You need to aim for the bullseye to get maximum points, but you can still get a decent score by only getting close to the bullseye.
Similarly, you need to be ambitious and try to land a guest blog on an industry-leading site. Blogging on a site close to it will also get you decent leverage in search engine rankings. Avoid low-quality sites altogether, as they will do more harm than good. You need to make sure your backlinks are worthy.
Not Creating Data-Driven Content
Many times your backlinks aren’t being indexed simply because the content is not good enough. When your content is boring or lacks substance, people won’t read it and when people don’t want to even click on it, the search engine takes it as a cue and demotes the content piece. This is why you need to adopt a data-driven content strategy.
Make sure your content contains information that your target audience finds valuable. Data-driven content is written for a specific audience, with a specific purpose, based on data from actual audience behaviors.
This content is also more likely to be read and shared. Make sure that the content is optimized by avoiding other tactics like keyword stuffing when you write content.
Also, ensure that you use unique content when posting on guest blogs. If the search engine finds duplicate content, they can penalize your site. Put a lot of statistics on your content pieces that would compel other sites in your industry to backlink to you.
Ideally, try to hire backlink building services as they can match you with a reputable site and help you create high-quality content that does wonders for your search engine rankings. Thus, they’ll help you index links properly.
Broken Links
A site with broken links is a bad site. It is a sign of carelessness and laziness. If a search engine spider comes across such a site, it will be a sure sign that the site is not carefully maintained and the owners do not care about what they are doing. The search engine will conclude that the site is not worth promoting and it’ll drop it lower in its rankings.
You need to make sure that the pages on your site are functional so that they don’t create embarrassment for you or the site you guest blog on. If you have a lot on your plate then it’s important to outsource to reputable link-building services, that can be vigilant on your behalf and help fix broken links.
Speed Issues
Site speed is a major deciding factor in where search engines rank your site. Nowadays, time is money. If your site is slow, search engines lose money, hence the poor ranking. Visitors want to consume your content quickly and search engines want to show the most relevant content to their users.
If a page takes a long time to load, Google may think that the page is low-quality and could rank the page lower in their search results. So the bottom line is, that you should optimize your web page to load faster.
If a page takes more than a few seconds to load, people will simply leave your site and go to a site that loads faster. The faster a page loads, the higher the chances of users seeing the content you want them to see.
To improve loading speed on a website ensure you compress and optimize images on the site. Other things that you can do include minimizing your redirects, installing a caching plugin, enabling browser caching, using a content delivery network, and selecting a hosting provider that has a track record of delivering high-quality service.
How to Index Links Properly: Conclusion
So to sum it up, unnatural link building might work for a while but your website will eventually be caught and severely penalized in rankings. This is why you need to put in the work in terms of producing high-quality content that websites with high domain authority want to post and their target audience find interesting.
You also need to fix issues such as website speed and broken links as they can cause embarrassment and ruin the whole user experience.
If you decide to outsource to index links properly, make sure you only hire a backlink building service that is experienced. Otherwise you will only end up wasting your money.