How long should you expect to wait before your newly-acquired links start boosting your rankings?
 by Casey Markee

How long should you expect to wait before your newly-acquired links start boosting your rankings?

  • Two months ago I purchased about $700 worth of directory listings in the hopes of building my inbound links. My problem is that, even though I'm now listed in these directories, Google still says I have zero inbound links.

    Traffic has not increased much either, which also has me really frustrated. Did I just waste a bunch of money or am I missing some key element in this process?

Answer: First of all, where are you checking your inbound link numbers? The search engine you use to do your link analysis makes a HUGE difference.

Google typically shows less than 10% of your backlinks, making it essentially useless when it comes to doing link analysis. The PageRank in the Google Toolbar is only updated every few months, so again pretty much useless as a reflection of your current link building efforts.

Microsoft Live also shows just a fraction of your inbound links. What makes Microsoft worse than Google for link analysis is that it shows many links that are of very low quality, such as search results pages or autogenerated pages created on spam sites.

Yahoo, on the other hand, provides very useful link data via their Yahoo Site Explorer interface. In fact, Yahoo's data is so good we use it to power the link analysis for your member's only Site Strength Indicator Tool. This toll makes it as easy as a click of a button to check your first 1000 links listed within Yahoo—which is the maximum number of links that Yahoo will show.

However, only seeing the first 1000 links isn't a serious drawback for two reasons...

  1. Yahoo sorts the links primarily in order of importance, and seeing a site's 1000 most important links is usually more than enough for most users' needs.
  2. If you really want to drill down deeper than the top 1000 links, check out our technique for finding all of a site's backl...

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