I checked the indexing status of backlinks for one of my projects and compared the results with the links displayed in Google Search Console. The results revealed a rather interesting situation.
Some of the referring pages aren’t in Google’s index. At least, they can’t be found using standard checking methods. However, the backlinks from these pages appear in Search Console, which means Google has discovered them and associated them with my website.
This raises a logical question: should I continue forcing these pages into the index? Or, if a backlink has already appeared in Search Console, can I assume that Google has seen it and may potentially be taking it into account?
It’s important to distinguish between two separate events:
- Google discovered the page and the backlink placed on it.
- Google added the page itself to its main search index.
These events don’t always happen at the same time. Googlebot may visit a page, crawl its content, find an outgoing link, and store information about it without adding the page to the search results. For example, Google may consider the page weak, duplicate, low-value, or simply unsuitable for display in search results.
If a backlink has already appeared in the Search Console report, it means Google has at least:
- visited the referring page;
- discovered the backlink;
- identified my website as its destination;
- stored information about this connection.
But does this mean the backlink is already passing its full authority? It’s impossible to say for certain. Search Console confirms that a backlink has been discovered, but it doesn’t reveal whether it is being used for ranking, how much authority it passes, or whether Google’s algorithms have devalued it.
Additionally, the Links report in Search Console is incomplete. Google displays only some of the backlinks it knows about, so a backlink’s absence from the report doesn’t necessarily mean that Google hasn’t seen it. Conversely, its presence confirms discovery but doesn’t guarantee any noticeable effect on rankings.
For now, I’m inclined to follow this logic: if a backlink has already appeared in Search Console, there’s little reason to repeatedly and aggressively force the referring page into the index. Google has already discovered the page and knows that the backlink exists.
Of course, you can support the page with internal links, add it to the referring website’s sitemap, or build a few external signals to it. However, I wouldn’t repeatedly submit the same URL to indexing services, especially questionable ones.
If the page isn’t indexed and the backlink doesn’t appear anywhere for an extended period, it may be worth investigating the referring website itself:
- Is the page accessible to Googlebot?
- Does it contain a
noindextag? - Is it blocked in
robots.txt? - Does it return a
200status code? - Is the backlink present in the source HTML?
- Does it appear only after JavaScript is executed?
- Does the page have any incoming internal or external links?
- Does it look like a weak or mass-generated page?
My preliminary conclusion is that seeing a backlink in Search Console is more important than the referring page being formally absent from the results returned by the site: operator. If Google displays the backlink in Search Console, it has already discovered it. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the backlink passes the same amount of authority as one from a properly indexed page.
Therefore, I wouldn’t rush to keep forcing these pages into the index. It’s far more useful to monitor the project’s overall performance: whether rankings are changing, new keywords are appearing, search visibility is growing, and a specific batch of backlinks is producing any noticeable effect.
What do you do in this situation? Do you continue trying to index the referring page until it appears in search results, or consider the job done once Google displays the backlink in Search Console?
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