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If a page or small blog site is created with backlinks to our website, but this page or site is deliberately not submitted to the Google index so the pages are not crawled and the links not seen by Google, is there genuine SEO value of these pages and backlinks existing?

Imagine this procedure:

  • identify keywords to promote
  • build content containing those keywords (apparently with ChatGPT or similar) containing backlinks to our site
  • use a free domain on wixsite.com with already high DR, like fred123.wixsite.com/amazing-site
  • put a template website on that wixsite containing a company profile and several blog pages, containing the pre-cooked content

At this point my normal action as a webmaster would be to submit the sitemap.xml that is automatically generated by the wixsite to Google, by creating a Property on Search Console and submitting the sitemap. If this is not done, I expect the page not to be indexed by Google, at least not without being found by a link from elsewhere.

If not indexed by Google, is this sensible white hat SEO practise?

I've got 10+ years of general experience with Google and SEO practises, so I know my way around Search Console, ahrefs, SEMRush etc.

The domain name has a very high DR, see image:

enter image description here

Edit: This post was edited to remove opinion and reference to an SEO company's practises.

Neek
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    Google is likely going to see these as "low quality", or even possibly "toxic" and unnatural backlinks without any authority. Most likely they'll have no impact at all. However there is a slight chance that it could penalize your site if it thinks you're violating its guidelines. I would stay clear of these kind of link schemes to generate low-quality, artificial content just for backlinks. Even when they do work, it's often just temporary as Google weeds out the thin/low-quality links. Instead try writing quality blogs and exchanging links with other relevant and high quality websites. – dan Oct 27 '23 at 06:04
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    For reference see Google's guide on: Unnatural links to your site and Link Spam. Also check out our Community Wiki on: What are the best ways to improve a site's position in Google? – dan Oct 27 '23 at 06:09

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From Ahrefs, comparing DR and UR:

While both ratings are based on backlinks, DR is calculated at the domain level. This means that it looks at the quantity and quality of domains linking to your entire website, whereas URL Rating (UR) looks at the the same factors for individual pages.

Basically, any page on wixsite.com will be given the same DR in Ahrefs. Any link pointing to any page of any site hosted on Wix will count toward this score, and because Wix hosts so many sites, it will have loads of links pointing to it, hence the high score.

However, a link from an individual page hosted on Wix will have no value unless link juice can reach it and it has backlinks of its own. It's the UR score you should care about, not the DR. In the example you give, the UR score is 0.

You want your own site's DR to be high, but it's a meaningless metric when judging backlink quality.

Also, any link building that isn't about getting your link in front of real people is definitely just black hat spam.

dan
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RichardB
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  • Thank you. Interesting, do you mean a subdomain fred123.wixsite.com will show exactly the same DR as any other subdomain, jenny234.wixsite.com, because they all just show the metrics for the main domain wixsite.com? I thought they had independent stats. I agree with your black hat comment, not sure if people following this practise are fooling themselves or fooling us. Maybe a case of "lies, damned lies and statistics". We are also actively engaging more reputable existing blogs and submitting our own content to generate more white hat linkage, which is muddying the water a little. – Neek Nov 02 '23 at 02:21
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    They look to be manually whitelisting some large sites, so that doesn't always happen, but they don't mention Wix ("Do all subdomains have the same DR as their root domains?"). https://ahrefs.com/blog/domain-rating/ Just checked a random site on wixsite, and it also returned a DR of 94, so I don't think they are on the list. If you have a paid account, you might want to send it as a bug report, as they really should be on the "service root domain" list. – RichardB Nov 02 '23 at 10:59