How To Encourage Google To Discover Links?

David5675

I got a valuable backlink from a high authority website (MSN), but the link is placed in the middle of a slideshow with 20 pictures, and the only way to reach it is by clicking through the slideshow.

After 6 months, this link still hasn't been noticed by Moz or Semrush, and I assume Google hasn't seen it either, because it's in the middle of a slideshow.

Is there any way to encourage Google to find this link? Or am I all out of luck?

Tom.Capper

@david5675

PageRank is a Google metric, which underpins their search engine. It's likely evolved since it was last publicly available, around a decade ago. When people say it's not used anymore, they tend to mean that it's not publicly visible anymore, or that Google is using some improved (renamed?) equivalent.

Page Authority is the equivalent Moz metric, which measures the strength of a page, and can be used as a proxy for PageRank. Obviously, being a Moz metric, it isn't used in Google's algorithm, but it's still useful to SEOs to estimate the value of a link. I must admit that Page Authority as a metric can be a little imprecise for new or undiscovered pages, though, which is unfortunate for your use case - similarly to Google, we initially guess the strength of a previously unseen page, before properly calculating it.

Domain Authority is another Moz metric but for evaluating domains rather than pages. Domain Authority attempts to answer the question "all things being equal, how likely is a page on this site to rank?". It's not very useful for evaluating links or pages though, because most sites have pages of vastly different strengths between their various pages. Again, being a Moz metric, Domain Authority isn't used by Google.

The two articles you link seem to support this distinction, but if you've found a Moz page that says otherwise, let me know, and I can get it updated.

David5675

@tom-capper

Thanks, but I'm actually more confused.

Pretty much every SEO resource I can find on the internet (including Moz) says Domain Authority counts for much more than PageRank, and PageRank apparently isn't even used anymore now.

Here are two examples:

https://www.seoblog.com/difference-domain-authority-pagerank/

https://linkdepartment.com/pagerank-vs-domain-authority/

Tom.Capper

@david5675

Unfortunately, this stumbles upon a common misconception with "high authority links".

The website (MSN) may be a high authority domain, but it's the strength of the page that links to you that counts, not the strength of the domain. Google's original PageRank methodology is based, as the name suggests, on using pages as nodes to estimate the prominence of other pages and their links.

As such, the fact that Google, Moz, and other tools may not have discovered this link, likely means it isn't a valuable link in the first place - despite the domain it's placed on.

That said, there are ways of forcing tools to discover links. For example, you could link to this page prominently on your own site. Really though this would achieve very little, unfortunately.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!

Tom

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