A Review of Paul Forcey’s “Indexing Tool” Plugin

December 17, 2010

UPDATE: This plugin is no longer available

If you do article marketing, your articles will be added to numerous blogs, especially if you use a service like Unique Article Wizard (UAW) or Article Builder. But, generally, once the articles are submitted, we all assume it’s job done and move on to something else.

Each article submitted will have a couple of links in it to your site and if there are several hundred versions of an article submitted to services like UAW or ArticleBuilder, then that’s several hundred backlinks we’ll get as a result. Right? That’s what I thought but it’s not the case.

You only get the backlinks if the page on which your article is published is indexed by the search engines (i.e. the search engines know it exists). And not all your submissions will get indexed. This even happens with the likes of EzineArticles and GoArticles. They may be high PR sites and there’s an assumption that submitting articles there will get you guaranteed backlinks with high PR juice. Yes, that may happen but it’s not guaranteed.

So, in order to get the backlinks and the benefit provided by them, as many of your article submissions as possible need to be indexed. And that’s where the Indexing Tool comes in.

RSS Feeds And The Indexing Tool

Each major article directory will provide you with an RSS Feed of your articles. You enter that into the Indexing Tool and it will put links to those articles onto your site. These links (you can set how many are displayed) can appear in a sidebar widget and/or at the bottom of each post. The Indexing Tool checks whether your articles have been indexed or not at regular intervals and only displays links to articles that have not already been indexed. So, as the search engines spider your blog, they see the links to your articles on external sites and index those pages and, hey presto, you now have another couple of backlinks. As articles are indexed, they’ll be removed from the displayed list and other non-indexed articles will be listed in their place.

You can only specify one RSS feed to use in the tool so if you want to mix links from different sources like EzineArticles and GoArticles, use RSSMix or Yahoo Pipes to aggregate the feeds into one and use the URL for that feed in the Indexing Tool.

Here’s what the results in the Indexing Tool panel look like (click for a larger view):

A Note On Links

One minor word of caution though. The search engines will only spider the first 100 links they find on a page. You might think that’s more than would ever appear on a page but when you consider the navigation buttons and links, comments links, affiliate links, and all the stuff you can have in sidebars, the link count adds up pretty quickly. The last place you want to put links from the Indexing Tool is below the Tag List in your sidebar (if you use one) as they’ll never get spidered there.

An Indexing Tool Bonus

Trackbacks are those comments you see in your blogs that start and end with an elipsis (…). They’re sent to your blog from blogs that publish your articles – a kind of: “Hey, I’ve published your article” notification. They’re not a great deal of use on their own as, like the articles submitted from UAW/ArticleBuilder, etc. those articles need to have been indexed in order for the backlinks in them to count.

The Indexing Tool comes with a bonus plugin called Trackback Feed that simply takes all of your trackbacks and creates an RSS feed from them. You can then add this feed to your other RSS feeds (using RSSMix or Yahoo Pipes) and have the Indexing Tool link to your articles on those external blogs as well.

Summing Up

his is a great little tool for making the most of your article marketing efforts. It continues working in the background, getting pages containing your articles indexed. And, should a page get de-indexed, the tool will recognize that and list the link to that page again so the search engines will get around to re-indexing the page.

You can use the Indexing Tool plugin on as as many of your sites as you want. You could have different blogs index different articles (by using different RSS feeds on each site) or use the same aggregated RSS feed on all your sites so each link in that feed has multiple chances of being indexed as the search engines spider your sites.

And, when you submit new articles to the article directories, the Indexing Tool will automatically pick up the links to them from the article directory’s RSS feed. So, basically, you only need to set up the Indexing Tool once per blog and it runs on autopilot from there on.

So the question is: Does it work? Yes, actually it does. You’ll see the tool in action in the “Other Articles You Might Like” section on this blog’s sidebar and at the bottom of this post (and other posts on the site).

What I’ve found though is that pages aren’t indexed in the order in which they’re listed on a site. Now I am using this plugin on several sites, some using the same aggregated feed of all combined RSS feeds (article directory RSS feeds and Trackback RSS feeds), some use an aggregate of a article directory feeds only and a couple are using just the EzineArticles or GoArticles feed directly. All that leads to a randomization of when links listed by the Indexing tool actually spidered and when the pages pointed to by those links get indexed. But using the Indexing Tool on several sites is the quickest way of getting my articles indexed and those all-important backlinks.

That’s the kind of plugin I like. The Indexing Tool is highly recommended.