A backlink only passes value if the page carrying it is in Google's index. “Live” on a vendor dashboard is a hosting status; indexed is the SEO status — and the two get treated as synonyms far too often.

Why link placements stay out of the index

Fresh web 2.0 profiles with one post and no internal links, platforms that noindex user-generated pages by default, tier 2 placements on low-crawl-demand sites, orphaned guest posts no archive links to. None of this is visible in a link report — all of it is visible in an index check.

The workflow

  1. Export the vendor's report to a .txt — one URL per line, deduplicated.
  2. Run it through the Google Index Checker — each URL is verified with several query types; you get back a per-URL indexed / not-indexed file. No ownership needed, first 50 checks free.
  3. Segment: indexed → count them; clean but not indexed → queue for indexing (the report file feeds straight into SpeedyIndex indexing or drip-feed); noindexed or dead → the vendor-dispute pile.
  4. Re-check the batch at day 14 and day 28. What's still out after a resubmission cycle tells you more about the vendor than any DR screenshot.

The full end-to-end process — including what to fix before resubmitting — is in the backlink indexation guide.

The reporting shift

Run this loop for a month and reporting changes from “300 links built” to “212 links indexed and counting”. One of those numbers is a cost line; the other is an asset.

Related reading