A note about indexing and backlinks

Let us clear up an annoyance of mine since the start the confusion over the word backlink. A backlink is genuinely the same as a link. Backlink = Link.

Link traders and buying backlinks

I always get emails from those link traders who sell links- duh! Well, they send you an Excel sheet or Google Sheet with a bunch of attractive DA urls and some other flavour of the time metrics. I’m hoping you know what I mean so you’re the right audience for this SEO post about backlinks. They target agencies like this- a lot.

It concerns me that I see the same kind of rubbish for sale on Fiver. Worse is the 5-star reviews, more on that later.

Are backlink gigs on Fiver any good? If you don’t know what you are doing it’s a straight NO, and you can endanger your domain by buying links.

Google has more information on spam practices you should be aware of as a website owner here. However there are some techniques where you can increase rank through link acquisition even purchasing with the aforementioned risk attached. It is fraught with risk and the rewards are not typically worth it.

What are you missing? Those of you just trying to jump on the SEO bandwagon which isn’t a great bandwagon but I suppose for scammers it is. This is especially for you. Learn about indexation and how to see if a page can be indexed.

View a pages source code and check for the following:

<meta name="robots" content="follow, index, max-snippet:-1, max-video-preview:-1, max-image-preview:large"/>

This meta tag tells crawlers who obey robots such as Google (bad bots don’t care) that this page will be followed and indexed. In fact, the default is follow and index so you don’t even need these directives. So what you need to search for on the page’s source code is “nofollow” and “noindex”. If you find these or either one by itself, the page is not good for links. Most scammers sell links on pages which never get indexed. You wasted your money.

A non-indexed page is not thought to be counted in terms of it’s links providing link juice as it stands to reason that the pages are not for searches and not valued by the domain they belong to. They may be crawled but often can’t be as they sit behind authentication, so noindex is bad.

A non-followed page (or nofollow link) (if indexed) discounts all of the links- in terms of passing link juice however there could still be some benefit for these links in the sense of a diluted vote. We simply don’t know how Google treats them. Some SEO’s believe that even a non linked brand mention has value, [Such as Check out the best Adidas running shoes for 2026]. The nofollow vs follow conversation is one to watch. It is beyond the scope of this primer on links.

Here is the complete Google specification of the use https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots-meta-tag

What the links are missing is a key point of INDEXATION, and therefore TRAFFIC. These pages where your links turn up are typically profile pages the high DA sites like sony.com (it doesn’t matter who) allow anyone to create. These member pages or similar are blocked from being indexed to save SEO for the domain. If they were indexed then Google would see the ‘Link Farm’ which these pages become. Do you pay for links on Facebook or on Twitter? NO for the same reason. There could be a social effect if they were influential pages but not an SEO benefit, unless the post is high traffic. You get an SEO benefit if your page has traffic regardless of the source. But it has to be natural. You can’t obviously just keep clicking your link yourself. Google isn’t that stupid. But it can be in some ways.

When a page isn’t indexed the links are worthless. Google is maybe allowed to crawl the page (if the crawl budget ever allows it) but it isn’t going to assign any value to these links.

Stop buying these kinds of backlinks. And absolutely stop rating these providers 5 stars on Fiver.

This is why people invest in guest posting on blogs and websites with traffic in relevant niches. I also like link insertions into articles that already have traffic through being indexed and known by Google and other search engines. If your link and content enhances the subject matter and provides another angle the link is good and will also benefit the SEO of that page too.

Link building is time-consuming and therefore expensive. So better to aim for a few links drip-feeding alongside onsite SEO and get your site technical SEO approved too. The rate at which you build links should appear natural. Another reason why getting even 10 links all of a sudden is a red flag. It’s easy to spot.

I always say do as much as you can to rank before buying links. You shouldn’t need them if you are a genuine business.