How many links do I need for deep crawling?

minimum number of backlinks required for google

[sdani]

Greetings,

I have a PR 3 Yahoo directory link since August 03. This caused Google to crawl my home page and pages directly linked on my homepage.
I have a PR6 link from a personal page hosted at a good university's site for few months and I also have some PR 2-3 links from Gimpsy, Jayde etc.
NONE of these links show up when I search for link:www.mydomain.com, including the PR 6 link.
I would like a deep crawl. Does anyone know how many links do I need for that? I would like to keep some target, when I start requesting links.

Does Alexa traffic ranking affect deep crawling. I know they do provide data in XML, so does google checks their Traffic ranking to determine deep crawling? If yes, I can increase my Adwords spending and thus increase my traffic rank.

Thanks in advance
SD

[Dayo_UK]

One pure HTML link can do it - a PR6 link would normally do it.

Not sure if Googlebot follows the method used in the Yahoo directory for links - someone else here would probably be able to confirm.

Also check to see the format of the link from the PR6 site.

The more links you have however will increase the chances and frequency of a deeper crawl.

Neither Alexa or Adwords Spending effect your Google Serps. (99% sure of this, but you never know ;))

Also check the format of the internal links within your site. Pure HTML links are a lot lot better than Javascript links.

[HarryM]

I get approx 70% of my pages visited each week (of 300+) with only two PR4 backlinks showing in Google. It was about the same when there was only one PR4 showing.

[added later] My guess is you need at least one PR4 backlink showing. [/added]

NONE of these links show up when I search for link:www.mydomain.com, including the PR 6 link

My gripe as well! :( I have several PR6, PR5, and PR 4 links that don't show even though some have been available since December. Google seems incredibly slow these days at both updating PR and crediting inbound links.

[sdani]

Thanks for the responses. So what I understand is, One PR6 link that I have so far "should have been" enough, but since it is not enough, I should just keep trying to get more links. I have already started this exercise. Since ysterday, I have added 3 more PR 4 links. Will update the board, if and when googlebot vists my site next time.

Thanks

[steveb]

You seem to be talking about unrelated things.

Has your site not been deepcrawled? How many pages exist and how many are in the index?

The PR6 link may not show in backlinks because it is a links.htm type page, but it might be doing its part in sending the bot your way.

If you have a oddly designed deep structure, like it pages exist five levels down, the bot may take forever to get that deep since your PR is at best 5.

[sdani]

I don't understand how are they unrelated. But here is the answer to what you have asked. If you can respond again, this would probably many things for me.

<<< Has your site not been deepcrawled? How many pages exist and how many are in the index?>>>

No, my site has not been deep crawled. I have 3 links on my home page and only 4 pages appear in google (Index and those other 3). On my site I have several hundred pages and one of the links on home page contain links to 10 pages. Each of those 10 pages has a link to its related 4-5 pages. So, in summary the site is not yet crawled one level below.

<<<The PR6 link may not show in backlinks because it is a links.htm type page, but it might be doing its part in sending the bot your way.>>>

I don't know what do you mean by links.htm type page, but the page's url is .edu/something/something/widgets.html, and the page has mentioned my site's URL as "http://www.widgets.com"><strong>Widgets.com</strong>
, just add href tag to this line.

<<<If you have a oddly designed deep structure, like it pages exist five levels down, the bot may take forever to get that deep since your PR is at best 5.>>>

It is good to know that my page rank is probably 5, My site's design may not be right for deep crawling, but at this time, I would be happy if only 20-30 pages are crawled and stay permanent in the index for 2-3 months. If that happends, I can work on creating deep crawl friendly links.

Thanks for all the responses.

[HarryM]

The PR6 link may not show in backlinks because it is a links.htm type page

This subject has been done to death recently, but there is no concensus whether what you say is true or not. Personally I would like it confirmed one way or the other, but until then am keeping an open mind.

[steveb]

No consensus on what?

There isn't any doubt that lots and lots and lots of links.html pages don't show as backlinks or pass PR. Whether some do or not doesn't relate to anything else.

In this case it would just be one of the obvious possibilities.

Sdani, if you don't know what your PR is, you might want to install the Google toolbar.

It does sound like your site isn't very spider friendly. You only have a few links leading to hundreds of pages. Put some more links on your main page, aim some links deeper into the site, give the bot somewhere new to go and it might decide to keep going longer. Get some other external links to your second level pages. Sounds like you definitely could use a couple of site map pages linked off your main page to give the bot dozens of links to look at at the same time.

[sdani]

Thanks for the inputs Steve. I do have google toolbar installed and it shows zero page rank.

[steveb]

With zero pagerank something else is going on.

How long have you had the PR6 link, and does it show up in the cache of that page?

Unless the PR3 page has a zillion links on it you should be showing PR1 at least.

[sdani]

The PR6 page does not show up when I do a search on google for "www.widget.com", (sites which contains www.widgets.com) but if I click on "repeat search with omitted results", that page does show up. In Google results it shows up as
...../widgetdealers.html - 52k - Feb 5, 2004.
It has about 40-50 links with descriptions of the pages and yes, my site is listed on that page if I click on Cache.

edit -> I have my site listed on this PR6 page for almost 4 months now.

[edited by: sdani at 12:02 am (utc) on Feb. 8, 2004]

[HarryM]

There isn't any doubt that lots and lots and lots of links.html pages don't show as backlinks or pass PR

Point taken. Yes, you're right, and Sdani should be aware of the possible dangers. I was letting of steam because so many people seem have jumped to the conclusion that the problem is purely the name links.html, whereas there may be other reasons, for instance the type of site on which the links page reside. Anyway it's off topic for this thread. But I still wish I knew the answer!