Creating backlinks, especially by hand, is a time consuming and boring task that most people don’t enjoy at all. In the past, the results were well worth the effort. “The more links, the better” was a good philosophy. With the newest Panda and Penguin Google updates, strategies need to change. Random backlinking is no longer as effective, and can even get you penalised, and getting links from sites that aren’t even indexed in Google won’t lower your rankings, but it won’t help them either. In today’s search engine optimisation world, quality is more important than quantity when it comes to backlinks. You will need to check out your links and find which of them are indexed, and only then can you come up with an effective plan.

When it comes to your business, time is the most important asset you have. Instead of just ignoring the backlinks you have that aren’t in the Google index, you should try to do something about it. The best links for Google these days are the contextual kind found within content you create on your own, which is time consuming. The less content you must create, the better off you’ll be. The industry average for links found is somewhere between 10 and 30%, but you can and should do a lot better than this. If you’re not sure what your indexing rate is, you need to find out. A good percentage to shoot for is between 70 and 90% to achieve less backlinks to get better results.

First things first

What you need to do first is figure out which of your links aren’t indexed, and then put them through a process designed to help them get linked. At this point all you can do is wait until the next Google update to check and see if the links have now indexed. One of the great ways to get links indexed is by linking to them from high authority social networking sites such as Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. If after your first round there are still links that aren’t indexed, start the process over with those that haven’t been indexed.

This is a guaranteed way to get your indexing percentage to go up. With each round of linking to pages from social media sites, your percentage will go up. Most marketers don’t use this technique at all, or if they do it’s on a very limited basis using just one social media site to link to the pages. Using a variety of indexing methods can be a lot more successful when trying for less backlinks to get better results.

Find Your Links

You would be surprised at just how many people, even successful SEO professionals, don’t know where their links are. Most marketers use backlink building techniques and just move on to their next task. This is not taking advantage of the “less backlinks to get better results” mentality. Finding the links, you’ve already made that aren’t indexed in Google and working on them can save you time and money. Keep a file detailing all the sites your link is on so that you can easily come back later to check and see if they are indexed or not.

While this might be difficult if your site is a blog, because blog networks often don’t disclose URLS to protect privacy, WordPress blogs will notify you with a “pingback” on your dashboard when you get a link. Then all you need to do is go to Google and see if they’re indexed.

Think about it like this: If you create 500 links per week, but only 20% are indexed, then you have 100 links. Increasing your percentage to 50% will give you 250 links, which is an increase of 150 links. This will cut down on wasted time and streamline your link-building process. The less backlinks better results idea can easily be a reality for your sites.

Experts have found that it only works around 25% of the time, which is probably around what your indexing rate is anyway. Utilising a “less backlinks to get better results” strategy of working to get your backlinks indexed is the best way to improve your rankings, save time, and have successful websites.