Confused About Google’s Index, Link Dampening, & No. of Links?

Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 8:48 PM

I recently received another ‘please facilitate’ email from a gentleman named Ian who runs an adventure company in Tanzania (http://www.betheladventure.co.uk ). Ian was concerned concerning the effect of a variety of issues together with indexing and link dampening, and was desperate for help. Unfortunately, he had scan some fairly misleading articles within the past, so he had a somewhat involved understanding of the factors at play. As a result of I suspect he’s not alone in his concern and confusion, I made a decision to publish the details of our discussion.

Ian’s email consisted of several questions. I’ve listed every separately below, followed by my response.

Q: After I seek for the quantity of backlinks to my website using “link:www.betheladventure.co.uk”, I see only twenty three results. It seems that solely 23 of our backlinks have survived Google’s dampening link filter. Is there a time delay before they are credited to a site? “

A: Firstly, I think you’ll have the dampening link filter a little confused. In step with the dampening link filter theory, your links are found and recognized by Google, you only don’t get the complete profit from them till a given period of time has elapsed. The dampening link filter (if it exists) does not stop links from showing in Google’s results when you explore for them. (The sole reason your backlinks may not seem during a Google search is if Google hasn’t nevertheless indexed the pages containing the links.) Additionally, don’t worry an excessive amount of about things like the dampening link filter. For a begin, it’s miles from established / accepted fact. Several well regarded SEO specialists don’t believe in it at all. Furthermore, whether or not it does exist, it only affects those businesses with the budget to generate the massive numbers (hundreds or thousands in all probability) of links reputedly required to trigger it. If your variety of backlinks suddenly will increase by 20, that’s no problem.

And secondly, do not believe everything Google tells you. By searching for “link:www.betheladventure.co.uk”, you usually solely see a tiny percentage of actual links to your site. The best method to search for links is to look for just the URL “www.bethaladventure.co.uk” , then on the page that displays next, choose “Realize web pages that contain the term “www.bethaladventure.co.uk” “. When you are doing it this manner, you’ll see all the pages that contain your URL. In most cases, the URL can be an active link (or at least it should be, and you must raise them to form it thus). When you do this search, you’ll see that your site has about 169 links, not 23.

Q: Another question is concerning indexed pages (using web site:www.betheladventure.co.uk). I understand this is a record of pages that are changed. I had 32, it went down to twenty-eight and currently this morning it’s right down to 26. Do they only keep the pages for a month or is there additional to the indexed pages than I realized?

A: The amount of indexed pages is simply the quantity of pages on your website that Google ‘knows concerning’. Theoretically, the only time the age of a page comes into play is when the page is simply too young*, i.e. Google spiders haven’t visited it however, or Google hasn’t updated its index. On why the reported number of indexed pages is reducing, I suspect it’s simply a temporary shift. The amount of leads to Google’s searches varies pretty much constantly.

*Truly, technically speaking, it has been prompt that Google is not capable of indexing all 11.5 billion pages currently believed to be on-line (and the ten million a lot of that are added every day), and that as it indexes new pages, recent pages are pushed out of the index. (This can be a terribly rough description of the theory – if it’s happening in any respect, it’s doubtless to be so much more complicated than this.) If this is often happening, it could make a case for why the reported variety of indexed pages is reducing. Though I suppose it’s a long shot, a good way to accommodate it’s to maintain top quality content, to keep increasing it, to keep generating backlinks, and to generate a Google sitemap. To find out a lot of concerning sitemaps, visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login . To download a free – and terribly useful – tool for generating a sitemap, visit http://johannesmueller.com/gs/ .

I apprehend there’s a lot of confusion surrounding these problems, so I hope you’ve got found this exchange helpful.

Happy indexing!

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