Can Backlinks that aren't indexed, still have a benefit?

RyanHSEO

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As the title says, can Backlinks that aren't indexed, still have a benefit on your site?
 
Sure. They might send you some direct traffic. But not from an SEO perspective.
 
If Google doesn't know that a link exists (not indexed yet), it can be beneficial because it may, at some point in the future, become indexed. If it isn't indexed because Google doesn't like the site it's on, it could actually hurt you, but at the very least it won't help you.
 
As the title says, can Backlinks that aren't indexed, still have a benefit on your site?

Of course they can... when they get indexed... somewhere in the future (worse case scenario you can index them with an indexer).
 
Of course they can... when they get indexed... somewhere in the future (worse case scenario you can index them with an indexer).
Obviously when they get indexed but I heard from an SEO on YouTube that Links pass power, even when they aren't indexed.
 
Obviously when they get indexed but I heard from an SEO on YouTube that Links pass power, even when they aren't indexed.
If you are talking about some cool link with noindex meta tag, yes it can help, a little for the link juice, but more for the diversity
If it's a normal spammy link, then you should probably avoid it
 
Obviously when they get indexed but I heard from an SEO on YouTube that Links pass power, even when they aren't indexed.

Obviously that SEO has no clue at all what he is talking about. Ranking algorithms take in consideration backlinks coming from the index. If something is not in the index, it can't be used. It's very simple logic, but then again SEO gurus never really put their logic to use.

This situation can be compared with the following scenario: when entering a country, the officer checks your passport against a database. If for some reason your passport is not registered in the database, you will NOT be allowed access no matter how legit the passport is. No passport in the database -> no entry; no link in the index -> no ranking.
 
Obviously that SEO has no clue at all what he is talking about. Ranking algorithms take in consideration backlinks coming from the index. If something is not in the index, it can't be used. It's very simple logic, but then again SEO gurus never really put their logic to use.

This situation can be compared with the following scenario: when entering a country, the officer checks your passport against a database. If for some reason your passport is not registered in the database, you will NOT be allowed access no matter how legit the passport is. No passport in the database -> no entry; no link in the index -> no ranking.
I don't want to be Devil's advocate again.. I hate it.. but one of the commonly used tags is follow, noindex.. so if the spider passes through the link to your website but the link isn't added to the index.. Google knows about it and its power already.. why wouldn't it pass link juice? Why would it have a smaller power than a link you tag as nofollow so you express your will for google not to check what's behind it, but google still does..
 
I don't want to be Devil's advocate again.. I hate it.. but one of the commonly used tags is follow, noindex.. so if the spider passes through the link to your website but the link isn't added to the index.. Google knows about it and its power already.. why wouldn't it pass link juice? Why would it have a smaller power than a link you tag as nofollow so you express your will for google not to check what's behind it, but google still does..

Ok, first off, nofollow and noindex are 2 different tags with very different use cases. Noindex tells Google to drop a page from the index. Once a page is dropped, any calculations (link juice that you call it) in the algorithms that took that page into account will change. Any page that has a link to/from that dropped page will be reduced in power (or become stronger if the dropped page was shit). This is completely in line with that I said above: if a link is in the index, it will be taken into account. If the link gets dropped from the index, it won't and this changes the "power" / "link juice" of every other page linked to it.

Second, if a spider passes through a link and doesn't index it, Google doesn't know its power. The power / link juice of a link is calculated AFTER it gets added to the index, not in the crawling phase. Spider crawling is a phase with a single purpose only: to discover links, not to index them, not to calculate their power.

Third, nofollow is just a tag implemented like 15 years ago and was supposed to help Google identify which sites are worth including in the index and which are not. It's a tag which has been invented in the very beginning of the web, however since it got abused to hell by webmasters, nowadays it's not worth at all. Whether you put a ******** or nofollow tag, this has nothing to do with Google's decision to spider a link, index it or calculate its power. Most SEO-s are obsessed with this tag, because they don't know better. This tag has absolutely no influence in the algorithms related to spidering, indexing or power calculation.

To recap, this is the process followed by Google (or any search engine for the matter):

1) Google bot spiders a link / page & checks for noindex tag. If it finds one, the link is not added to the index at all.
2) If the tag is not found, the link is run through an algorithm which checks if the link is "worthy" of inclusion in the index. If it's not, it's not added to the index.
3) If the link is worthy, it's added to the index.
4) Once in the index, algorithms calculating the power of links are re-run to take into account the newly added link(s).
5) Steps 1-4 are repeated again in an endless loop.
 
If they are not Do-follow then no.
 
If you are not focusing on Google (66% of the search market) for indexing and ranking, but are doing your SEO via Bing and Yahoo (34% of the search market), you may have situation where you are not indexed for Google purposes, but are indexed or recognized by Bing/Yahoo.

So you can have SEO results without Google indexing, but it may be only one third as big. This can be compensated for by doing more referral traffic building, or by capitalizing on what some say is the greater responsiveness (CTR-wise) of Bing search results.
 
Google can see it, if it crawls the page.

Then it is up to them if they want to index it or not


Probably won't pass juice though
 
Even indexed don't have power since 2010 when Google drop Page Rank support and drasticly lower it's importance in their algorithmes. I just wonder all that forum about methods that was popular 12 years ago but people still thinking it's ok to spam through link-o-thrashes and wait for a results. 2020 years now guys - self-driving cars, AI and quantum computing and you still jerk off on links, lol.
 
Even indexed don't have power since 2010 when Google drop Page Rank support and drasticly lower it's importance in their algorithmes. I just wonder all that forum about methods that was popular 12 years ago but people still thinking it's ok to spam through link-o-thrashes and wait for a results. 2020 years now guys - self-driving cars, AI and quantum computing and you still jerk off on links, lol.

There is still pagerank just internal we call more authority link

Also cant remember this was said but google even did stimulation without link did not look good

So what is the secret then seo guru

You rank competitive terms
 
To people saying if google can't index the link, it won't pass the link juice. I have a question. In webmaster tools, you see hundreds of links from sites like Pinterest,tumblr and other web 2.0s (organically built for brands) but these links are not indexed. So are you guys saying these links have no effect on rankings and can't pass the link equity? As these links have been crawled and are showing in search console so the algorithm must think these are good enough to be included in the site's link profile but not good enough for google index as it won't be ranking for any keywords.

Would like to hear thoughts of more experienced members of the community on this too.
 
There is still pagerank just internal we call more authority link

Also cant remember this was said but google even did stimulation without link did not look good

So what is the secret then seo guru

You rank competitive terms

Yeap, it still has this criteria, but I mean it has 140+ other criterias and PR on 101st place. Page Rank pretty old conception which worked well for web 1.0, when search engine developers just tried to work with texts quality. Nowadays Google it's monster that has it's own browser and mobile OS that collect and send all type of data about you, biggest ads networks and analytics network that literally setup to every second site. Why they need silly PR when they see how their trusted users interact with a site in real time. Don't forget about AI which can understands if you site is a thrash or if it can't it sends to assesors for manual check. I think guys you to much overate backlinks, I even could say more internal linking way more important than that. Just try to check any top site and it looks like wikipedia with links on other articles and auto-previews etc.
 
If you are not focusing on Google (66% of the search market) for indexing and ranking, but are doing your SEO via Bing and Yahoo (34% of the search market), you may have situation where you are not indexed for Google purposes, but are indexed or recognized by Bing/Yahoo.

So you can have SEO results without Google indexing, but it may be only one third as big. This can be compensated for by doing more referral traffic building, or by capitalizing on what some say is the greater responsiveness (CTR-wise) of Bing search results.

Since when Bing has 1/3 of market share?! Lol, that's more like 10%.

To people saying if google can't index the link, it won't pass the link juice. I have a question. In webmaster tools, you see hundreds of links from sites like Pinterest,tumblr and other web 2.0s (organically built for brands) but these links are not indexed. So are you guys saying these links have no effect on rankings and can't pass the link equity? As these links have been crawled and are showing in search console so the algorithm must think these are good enough to be included in the site's link profile but not good enough for google index as it won't be ranking for any keywords.

Would like to hear thoughts of more experienced members of the community on this too.

How do you know those links are not indexed?
 
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