Crawling vs. Indexing
There is a lot of buzz around getting "indexed by Google" and I think it's important to weigh in on the issue. I'll start with the summary and work backwards...
SUMMARY
If you are doing heavy link building (profiles, comments, and other weak links) Linklicious is a perfect tool because it guarantees crawling at 100%.
FACTS
You can rank with zero links in the index
Indexed links are more valuable than non-indexed links
Weak links are difficult to index and are poorly found by Google
Getting links indexed is time consuming and/or expensive
DETAILS
We rank terms all the time with just profiles or profiles and a blog/article blast. Let me give an example... This week one of our local clients made it to page 1 for 'Houston Diabetes'. This interior page was a brand new page and not in the top 250 but we built some profiles and 8 days later it was on page 1. We did an index check on the links and exactly two were indexed.
It goes without saying that indexed links are more valuable and give more juice than non-indexed links. If Google sees something as valuable it puts it in the index or cache and does its best to leave the weak pages out. I haven't done enough testing to measure exactly how much more an indexed link is worth, so I won't make a pull-it-out-of-my-rear guess.
For those of you who have tried to index weak links, you'll know the amount of work it can take. I've run an enormous amount of tests to see what can do it - tweets, pings, blog comments, other forum profiles. The bottom line is it can take a dozen or more links just to get one page indexed. Common sense tells me that those dozen links would be more effective and less diluted pointing directly at my money site.
If you get 1000 forum profiles or blog comments, getting them indexed is silly. You are going to need a huge farm of BIE or BE sites or pay a lot of money per link. Do you want to spend time managing those setups, creating the 2.0 accounts, handling the accounts that have been killed, or paying a lot per link? For those of us where time is valuable, it's much better to save time and shift the money to buying more links. It's the same (or less) cost, and an enormous amount more time.
When does indexing make sense?
When you are trying to build a balanced link profile of spam vs good stuff is one good case.
If you want to keep the backlinking profile clear of too many spammy links.
Link pinging from Linklicious is great for two reasons:
It is dirt cheap.
It can make your forum profiles go from 5% to 100% crawls, which is a 20x improvement in your effectiveness. I know it's obvious to most, but this is important: if your link isn't crawled it does you no good!
Can Linklicious help you with indexing? Sure, a bit. But Google will never keep weak pages in the index for long. The main goal of the site is to magnify and multiply the effect of your everyday volume link building. It isn't a golden ticket to #1, but it lets you extract the full value from your current link building efforts.
Notes from the site:
We've been live two weeks now!
We have a couple of cool things coming for the Pro users to make the service even more awesomer (oh yeah!)
We've upped our capacity to handle over 40 crawls a second. For comparison's sake, on the initial beta site we could handle just 1.6! We can scale up in literally an hour should we have the need.
We are waiting for our DBA to get back from a personal matter to make some important performance tweeks. Right now adding links manually sometimes is unbearably slow. We're on it!
We pushed out some 10 minor edits this past week and have another 10 or so on tap for this coming week.
We've had some great suggestions around the Wordpress plugin and will put those in the queue.
I've got three favors to ask:
If you've seen good success with the service, please post up in forums about it. We aren't advertising and word of mouth really helps us continue to improve and grow.
If you have any ideas about how we can make the service better, please send them in. We have enough in the queue to get us through February, but I want to keep this baby growing!
If you aren't tracking your results, please do. As SEOs you have an obligation to maximize your success. If you don't measure everything you do, you are just making your life that much harder. For every keyword I target I keep a log in a Google doc detailing how many links I build, what type of link I build, and when I make them. When I rank my words I can immediately see exactly what did it.
About Linklicious
Linklicious was built by Houston SEO - Houston Web Designer - Humankind Search Engine Optimization and is designed and constructed by professional IN HOUSE developers. Our projects have ranged from transactional systems handling millions of dollars a month to fault tolerant server farms with a dozen or more boxes. I want this service to be amazing and useful, to continue to focus on automating the tedius parts of our job, and keep our community strong.
If you are confused about the service or wonder how all of this works, take a look at the infographic. And if you haven't upgraded, check out on what you are missing out on!
Stay tuned as we shake things up!
