Link indexing services such as Backlinks Indexer and Nuclear Link Indexer claim they can help get more of your backlinks indexed in Google. We all know that that in order to rank well you need to have a lot of links, but only links that are indexed in Google count, because if Google doesn’t find the link than it can’t credit it toward your site. These link indexing services claim they can help Google find all of your links.

How do they work?

Link indexing services should be renamed to “link crawling services” because all they can do is improve the chances that your links will be crawled. Google ultimately decides if each backlink provides enough value to actually index. For example, just because you can get 10,000 forum profiles crawled does not mean that all 10,000 are going to be indexed and ranked in Google.

These services improve the chances that your link will be crawled by creating more backlinks to them, usually in the form of links in their internal blog networks, links in referrer logs, links in internal social bookmarking accounts and by creating and pinging RSS feeds that contain your links.

How much do they cost?

Most link indexing services cost between $30 and $100 per month depending on the plans you choose. The more backlinks you need indexed, or rather crawled, the more it costs.

Do they work?

I tested several link indexing services extensively and over a period of one year. Throughout my tests I monitored the percentage of links that were successfully indexed and compared them against control groups of links that I allowed to become indexed naturally.

Despite the claims by these services, I personally found that they were able to index around 20% more links than would have been indexed naturally. Of course, given more time the additional 20% links may very well become naturally indexed as well.

In my experience they do work, just not at the same rate that they claim.

My opinion on link indexing services

I personally stopped using these services after my testing was complete. Although I did see an increase in my indexed backlinks, I didn’t see increases in my rankings that I could attribute to the additional links that were indexed. Also, I didn’t find the small increase in indexed links worth the time that was required to maintain my link indexing accounts.