if anyone can jump in with recent indexing rates I would appreciate that
This is going to be a bit of a long post, so please go through it all. I want to be as thorough as possible, and seeing millions of links a day I can give some insight into what's going on.
- Google has gotten a bit tougher on indexing over the past couple of months. Nothing too crazy, though.
- Higher quality stuff (bookmarks, articles, etc) still index at a higher rate (60-80%), but lower quality stuff will be much lower.
We get at least a couple of people a week wondering about low indexing rate. In 98.2% of the cases, though, it is explained by one of these reasons. In order of frequency:
1. The links are built on sites that are deindexed
2. The links are built on sites that are marked 'noindex' in robots.txt or meta tags
3. The person isn't checking indexing correctly (info: search in Google)
4. Duplicate content issues (both on the same site and different sites)
5. A rel canonical tag points to a different page
6. The link/site quality is super low. (overspammed site vs higher quality)
7. Thin content pages (no content around the link - this is where I've seen most of the indexing drop come from)
Here's a dirty little secret, though... Indexing is not required for ranking. Awareness of the links IS required for ranking. Indexing is required for your backlinks (like the cheap forum profiles) to show up in the SERPs. But you want your money site to show up, so that isn't as important. In other words, use the actual SERP results/your ranking to determine the effectiveness. We do case studies all the time to see what works and what doesn't. But don't believe me - take the time to test for yourself!
tldr; As long as you're building decent quality stuff, you'll still index just fine. Maybe not the crazy 80-90% we'd see sometimes, but still high. Google has just gotten a bit harder on the lower quality stuff. And - regardless of the quality - the indexing service still dramatically increases the effectiveness of your link building.