How long does it take..

[EdRust]

..for links to propagate?

It has been a little over two weeks since I exchanged links with a few sites.

When I go to google or yahoo and search link:www.BuyAccountingSoftware.com none of the sites I exchanged with show up as linking to me.

I browsed through to the other sites and links to me are there.

Also when searching for incoming links to the sites which I now link to, my links to them do not show up either.

My log files show several spiders/bots have crawled my site since the links were added. Any Ideas about why these links do not show yet, or am I just overanxious?

[Gary Golden]

Link exchanges sometimes take time to appear in the search engines, the important part of links is that they are like search engines and by having the links will bring extra business to your site. Since I have started my link exchange I have noticed in my stats that my business is coming from all of the links I have in addition to the search engines.
So links are an important part of your web business and I encourage you to continue expanding you link exchange. When people think that they don't want a link exchange because they don't want to send their business elsewhere they are not seeing the big picture.
On the internet the saying really is a fact "You scratch my back and I will scratch yours."

Keep exchanging links!

[janeth]

I do not know how true this is but I herd Google was taking about three months to find links.

[EdRust]

to Janeth and Golden for their prompt replies to my question.

I keep checking every day so I will update this when I see that the links so up, and I/we will have at least 1 data point to judge by.

I hope it is not 3 months!

[rlrouse]

If the page linking to your site isn't at least PR4 or higher, the link usually won't show up with the Google link: command at all. Assuming the linking page isn't under a Google penalty, it will count towards your page's ranking though (as well as give it a boost from the link anchor text).

[btg]

Hi,
I personally have been trying to explain the reason links do not appear on google, to a company who i linked to but they could never find their link.
The reason i think this happens is that google,
only spiders other engines which it decides are suitable, so you have to manually make them check for further results.

Example of this is, you have a link from your site to another, but your site is listed on an obsure search engine.
So if you search google like this
link:http//www.yoursite.com you will receive some results.
but if you type in
link:http//www.yoursite.com boat sales
you will recieve more results.
Adding a meta tag word included within your web site, at the end of the url address will get them to produce a better result.

All the best to all
Janet
www.boatstogo.co.uk

[mm99]

It's very simple really, when you search for google links, it only displays links that have a certain PR or better. I'm pretty sure it's 3 or 4. Anything else they don't bother with, if you're taking a look at the people linking to you. If you go to alltheweb, youll get a lot more.

I recently used a program that checks links across several of the major ses. When I checked on one of my sites, goog listed 9 and alltheweb listed the most with 29. These figures will give you a ballpark idea of what I mean.

As far as 3 months goes, I'm not sure I've heard of that one and I'm certain I'vexpirenced anything close to that, that I noticed anyway.

peace...Paul

[internetbasedmom]

Agreed...it's usually a PageRank (PR) of 4 that's required to actually be listed (I don't see too many 3s anymore). And that's on the page that is linking to you, not the website's home page. So, in reality it may be some time before many of your links show up.

Don't let this discourage you from getting links from low PR pages. Everyone is building up their PR and if there are other benefits to linking with that site (ex. reaches your target market, etc.), then it's still a good idea.

So...in short, you won't likely ever see all your incoming links on Google. If you want to see a better indication of who is linking to you, go to http://www.alltheweb.com and check there. You'll probably see a lot of the links you aren't seeing on Google.

Good luck!

Alice

[Orion]

First off the owner of those pages would have to list them in Google meaning their site must be first listed in Open Directory Project. Then there must be a clear path from the index page to the page that contains the link to your site for that page to also be index in google (careful if you're using ASP, PHP, CGI for your links pages).

However, it seems that recently Google is trying to discourage indexing links pages, and outright banning pages or sites that use link exchange programs (for the purpose of increasing page rank).

Last is that it might be a newer site and just take time to get fully indexed.

[mrmylesdean]

Just wondering why you stated "...careful if you're using ASP, PHP, CGI for your links pages." when it comes to link indexing. Haven't head of this one yet. Thanks,

/Myles

[maniactive]

Just wondering why you stated "...careful if you're using ASP, PHP, CGI for your links pages." when it comes to link indexing. Haven't head of this one yet.

/Myles

I know I'm butting in here, but I **THINK** this might be a reference to being careful about linking to dynamically-delivered content overall...asp, php, cgi, etc. Dynamically delivered pages are written on-the-fly based on an individual's instruction to a database. Because the content changes for each request, dynamic pages tend not to get spidered by the major search engines. Further, dynamic formats often deliver pages with "?" in the title, and spiders don't read addresses with "?"....better to have them be delivered as static pages, or html, or use ASAPI or third party software to convert them to "/" pages.

(Please feel free to correct me if I misunderstood the writer's original intention...I know forum folks aren't shy!)

I have a related issue right now: on Friday, a client changed all his static html pages to asp pages (the reason - so that he could put "includes" in the design that made each page have the same look and feel. I know, I know. . .you can do it in plain old html. . . I'm still struggling with why he felt this was necessary.)

By Monday, we noticed that his page views (but not his # of visitors) dropped significantly. I'm puzzled by why this is happening...any thoughts?

I'm also curious...anybody have a good argument for using asp, cgi, php, etc. to deliver static pages??

Thanks!

[EdRust]

I use .asp pages, because they are an easy way to make a page to interact with the local access database on my local machine. I am certain there are many other ways to do it. But the .asp way was just so easy and while I am pretty good at database stuff, I am still pretty new at coding in anything besides c++ VB or sql.

[chris_g]

EdRust asked: "How long does it take for links to propagate?"

There is usually a difference between how long it takes for you to see the links in Google by checking your backlinks and how long before you see a benefit from those links.

The benefits are a bit hard to pin down since usually more that 30 days has passed before you see any change, assuming Google finds the link. Google doesn't tend to update the backlink results more than once every 2-3 months lately. Benefits usually occur before you see the links in the results.

maniactive wrote: "Because the content changes for each request, dynamic pages tend not to get spidered by the major search engines. Further, dynamic formats often deliver pages with "?" in the title, and spiders don't read addresses with "?"....”

ASP and PHP pages are not a problem to index properly in any of the major search engines. There can sometimes be problems with the way the site is designed but there are HTML websites that don't index properly. The extension doesn't present problems its the site design that can cause the problem. Some designs are more crawler friendly than others.

The URLs in most cases are a problem although Google can crawl most dynamic URLs as long as they don’t have session ID in the URL.