Hi, I am really confused about backlinks and page index. I was just browsing through directorycritic and found out that some sites have no backlinks for google but have many pages indexed. These sites are doing really well as far as search engine traffic is concerned. What my question is, should i go for more backlinks or get more pages inded on google? And more importantly, what does indexing of a page means? Thanks
if a page is indexed that means it's "in" google. ie it's possible to find it, at least theoretically. pages can be indexed (and even rank well) without having any visible backlinks. use msn or yahoo to check backlinks, not google; they rarely update their backlinks and when they do, most don't show.
Rusting, when Google "indexes" a page, it means that they have found it on the internet and have included it in their index. That means that it will begin to show up somewhere in the search engine results pages (SERPs) when people are searching on Google. In a sense, having the page indexed is similar to having your name in the phone book — it's there for searchers to find. "Backlinks" are a different thing. These are links to your site from some other website. It is important to have lots of indexed pages and lots of good backlinks.
But in order to index a page, you need backlinks right? I mean as far as i have understood google wont crawl your site without backlinks.
Not really. You dont need backlinks to get your site indexed by google (although its the best way to get your site indexed fast), you can submit your site to google, either using sitemap tool or ancient site submission tool (Not a wise idea to do, can take ages to get your site indexed). and google doesnt show your backlinks till it exports the data to the public view so even if you have backlink, google may not be showing it all.