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

I recently received another ‘please help’ email from a gentleman named Ian who runs an journey company in Tanzania (http://www.betheladventure.co.uk ). Ian was concerned about the effect of a variety of issues including indexing and link dampening, and was desperate for help. Unfortunately, he had read some fairly misleading articles within the past, therefore he had a somewhat concerned 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 small print of our discussion.

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

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

A: Firstly, I suppose you will have the dampening link filter a little confused. In line with the dampening link filter theory, your links are found and recognized by Google, you only do not get the complete benefit from them until a given period of your time has elapsed. The dampening link filter (if it exists) does not stop links from appearing in Google’s results once you look for them. (The only reason your backlinks would possibly not appear in a very Google search is if Google hasn’t nevertheless indexed the pages containing the links.) Additionally, do not worry too much regarding things just like the dampening link filter. For a begin, it’s far from established / accepted fact. Many well regarded SEO experts don’t believe in it at all. Furthermore, even if it does exist, it solely affects those businesses with the budget to get the large numbers (tons or thousands probably) of links apparently required to trigger it. If your range of backlinks suddenly increases by twenty, that is no problem.

And secondly, don’t believe everything Google tells you. By looking for “link:www.betheladventure.co.uk”, you usually solely see a small percentage of actual links to your site. The best approach to search for links is to look for simply the URL “www.bethaladventure.co.uk” , then on the page that displays next, select “Find web pages that contain the term “www.bethaladventure.co.uk” “. When you are doing it this way, you may see all the pages that contain your URL. In most cases, the URL will be a full of life link (or a minimum of it should be, and you ought to ask them to make it therefore). When you do this search, you may see that your site has regarding 169 links, not 23.

Q: Another question is about indexed pages (using site:www.betheladventure.co.uk). I perceive this is often a record of pages that are changed. I had thirty two, it went down to twenty-eight and now this morning it is all the way down to 26. Do they only keep the pages for a month or is there a lot of to the indexed pages than I spotted?

A: The quantity of indexed pages is simply the quantity of pages on your website that Google ‘knows concerning’. Theoretically, the sole time the age of a page comes into play is when the page is just too young*, i.e. Google spiders haven’t visited it yet, or Google hasn’t updated its index. As to why the reported range of indexed pages is reducing, I think it’s simply a short lived shift. The quantity of ends up in Google’s searches varies just about constantly.

*Truly, technically speaking, it has been urged that Google isn’t capable of indexing all 11.five billion pages currently believed to be online (and the ten million additional that are added every day), which as it indexes new pages, old pages are pushed out of the index. (This can be a very rough description of the theory – if it’s happening the least bit, it’s doubtless to be far additional complicated than this.) If this is often happening, it could make a case for why the reported range of indexed pages is reducing. Though I assume it’s a long shot, a sensible way to house it is to maintain prime quality content, to keep increasing it, to keep generating backlinks, and to generate a Google sitemap. To seek out out a lot of concerning sitemaps, head to http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login . To download a free – and very useful – tool for generating a sitemap, attend http://johannesmueller.com/gs/ .

I grasp there’s a ton of confusion surrounding these problems, thus I hope you have found this exchange helpful.

Happy indexing!

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