Traffic, indexation, and whether the page is alive

Lesson 8 of 50Module 2 · Judging link quality6 min read

By Bill Hartzer · Hartzer Consulting · 25+ years in search, domains and expert witness work

Three separate questions people collapse into one

"Is this a good page to get a link on?" hides three questions that have different answers and different checks.

• Is the page indexed? If Google has not stored the page, the link on it is not part of any index Google consults. This is binary and it is checkable.
• Does the page get traffic? Traffic tells you humans reach the page. Humans who reach the page can click your link, and referral clicks are the only part of a link's value you can measure directly.
• Is the page connected? Does anything else on the site link to it? A page can be indexed and still be a cul-de-sac that no internal link points at and no crawler revisits.

These can diverge in every combination. A page can be indexed and get no traffic. A page can get traffic from a newsletter and never be indexed. A page can be indexed, get traffic, and still be structurally isolated. Check them separately.

Indexation: how to check and what the result means

The direct check is a site query for the exact URL: site:example.com/exact/page-url in Google. If the page comes back, it is indexed. If it does not, something is wrong — the page may be blocked, canonicalized elsewhere, too new, or judged not worth storing.

Two cautions that matter. First, site queries are approximate and occasionally show pages that are no longer in the main index. Treat a positive as likely and a negative as a strong signal to investigate rather than as proof. Second, and more important: check the exact URL, not the domain. "The site is indexed" is not the claim you need. I have reviewed placements on domains with thousands of indexed pages where the specific purchased page was not among them.

Back the site query with a plain search for a distinctive sentence from the page in quotes. If a page's own unique text returns nothing, the page is not indexed under that text. Also check the page's own signals: does it carry a noindex meta tag, is it blocked in robots.txt, does it canonicalize to a different URL? A page that canonicalizes elsewhere is telling search engines to credit a different page — and your link is not on that one.

There is a specific version of this problem worth naming. Web 2.0 profiles, forum signature pages, and free subdomain posts are frequently sold as links and are frequently not indexed at all. The platform itself is enormous and authoritative; the individual profile page is one of millions of near-empty pages the platform has no reason to want indexed. The domain metric on the seller's spreadsheet is real. The link is not doing anything.

Traffic: how to estimate it and how to read the estimate

You cannot see another site's analytics. What you can do is triangulate, and be honest that the result is a range and not a figure.

• Third-party traffic estimates. Ahrefs, Semrush and similar tools estimate organic traffic from the keywords a page ranks for and modeled click-through rates. They are systematically wrong in predictable ways: they undercount traffic from social, email, direct and referral, and they overcount for pages ranking on high-volume terms they do not actually convert. Use them to distinguish "some" from "none", not to compare 400 visits against 600.
• Keyword footprint. Does the page rank for anything at all? A page ranking for nothing gets no organic traffic by definition, whatever its domain scores.
• Engagement evidence. Comments with real names and specific questions, shares, forum discussion, citations from other sites. These are hard to fake at any scale and easy to observe.
• Freshness of the surroundings. A blog whose most recent comment is four years old is not a place with an audience.

A page with genuinely zero traffic is not automatically worthless — some links are worth having for context and durability rather than clicks. But zero traffic plus zero relevance plus a price tag is three strikes.

The orphaned page problem

This is the failure that costs buyers the most money, because it is invisible from the outside unless you specifically look for it.

An orphaned page is a page that exists on a site but has no internal links pointing to it. It is not in the navigation, not in the blog index, not in the category listings, not in the sitemap, not linked from any other post. You can reach it if you know the URL. Nothing on the site will take you there.

Why this destroys the link's value: PageRank flows through links. A page's ability to pass value to your site depends on the value flowing into it. A page with no internal links receives essentially nothing from its own domain, so it has essentially nothing to pass on. The domain's Domain Rating of 80 was computed from links pointing at the domain, and none of that reaches a page the site itself does not acknowledge. There is a second effect: pages nothing links to are crawled rarely and often drop out of the index entirely.

This is the standard shape of a low-effort paid placement. The seller publishes your article, it never appears in the blog index or any category, and six months later it is gone from the index without anyone noticing. The invoice was for a link on a DR 80 domain. The delivery was a URL.

How to check. Search the site for the page: use site:example.com with a distinctive phrase and see whether the page appears in the site's own listings. Open the site's blog index and category pages and look for the article where it should be. Check the XML sitemap — most CMS platforms publish one at /sitemap.xml — and see whether the URL is listed. Run a crawler such as Screaming Frog from the home page and see whether the URL is discovered; if a crawl starting at the home page never reaches the page, neither will anyone else. And check whether the post appears in the site's RSS feed, since feeds are generated from the same publishing flow that produces index pages.

A five-minute liveness check

Run this on every candidate URL before agreeing to anything. It is fast enough to do on twenty prospects in an afternoon.

1. Fetch the URL. Does it return 200, or a redirect chain, or a soft 404 that returns 200 with an error page?
2. Check the exact URL is indexed with a site query and a quoted-phrase search.
3. Read the page source for noindex, a canonical pointing elsewhere, and whether your link would be rendered in HTML or injected by JavaScript.
4. Look for the page in the site's own structure — blog index, categories, sitemap, RSS.
5. Check for internal links pointing at it from other posts.
6. Look for signs of readers — recent comments, shares, discussion elsewhere.
7. Check the page's rank footprint — does it rank for anything?

One more habit worth building: re-run this check on links you already have. In my own profile analysis, 97.4% of lost links disappeared while the source page was still perfectly reachable — only 4 lost links out of 645,202 were lost to a 404. Links do not usually die because pages die. They die because pages get edited, redesigned, or republished without them. A page that is alive today is not a page that will still carry your link in three years, and the only way to know is to look.