Indexed Pages and Backlinks

[riefderrico]

I found a site that allows you to check your page rank, pages indexed, backlinks, wesite value etc... (SmartPageRank.com) I'm confused - I thought that backlinks were where we linked to other sites not to the search engines and I thought that if your site was submitted to MSN or Altavista that they indexed your pages. Can anyone offer some clarity as to how these things work?

Thank you.
K

PS Moderators - pls remove/alter the referenced site above if this violates any rules.

[VRI]

I don't know about the tool but backlinks are the links to your site and submitting your site to search engines is pretty much a waste of time these days.

Search engines will find and index your site from your backlinks. The better, and more backlinks the more consistent your site will be crawled and more pages will get/stay indexed.

[Jaysonnhs]

Here's a link that explains back links - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink -

I think you understand it correctly. Each search engine has a different number of backlinks on record for your site. e.g. Google shows the you have 1 backlink and Yahoo shows that you have 257 (both figures include links to pages on your site from your own site). This is normal, Google usually shows less backlinks than Yahoo. The Google amount of links shown is not very accurate. You can check you links using the commands below -

Google
link:www.example.com

Yahoo
linkdomain:www.example.com

In addition, each search engine indexes a different amount of pages from a website and it usually takes time for a search engine to fully index a large website (months and months and months and months and....) - if they ever do.

As VRI mentioned, there isn't a need to submit to search engines as they'll find your site and content from backlinks. Submitting your website to a search engine doesn't mean they'll index your website.

It looks like you currently have 288 pages of your website indexed

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%...L_enUS233US233

[elizabeth]

backlinks are the links to your site

Hhhmmm... Backlinks are not the links from your site rather the incoming links to a website . That's a different thing, right?
But you are right that submitting your site to S.E is a bit waste of time, let Seacrh Engine find way to crawl your site. Anyway, submission of site to Search Engine is not for backlinks purpose rather on quick indexing.

[curtisreddehase]

Who you link to with respect to relevance and pr is also important. Be sure to to link to trustworthy sites that appear to do the same.