If Links not in GWT does that mean they havent been Indexed yet?

[AshShep1]

Hi we have had some success recently with increased rank positions, so I am trying to find our what's caused it?

Am I correct in thinking that if google hasnt listed any new links in my GWT account that it hasnt indexed them yet and therefore not impacting my rankings?

Thanks

Ash

[David-Kley]

Look at Google Analytics, and check your inbound source links. Sometime they will pick up on things that GWT hasn't. Also,  a good idea is to link your 2 google accounts together for the best data correlation. (GWT and analytics)

[CleverPhD]

Yes.  GWT links can be out of date.  This has been mentioned in various places.

If you want to hear it from the horse's mouth see this GWT hangout

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OuD3NuxiNY

At about 21:45 there is a question about how Google handles 410 and why they keep crawling them.  Then at about 27:00 it moves into the re-spidering of dead links and if/when they are updated in GWT.  A participant brings up dead links that are mentioned in the links report in GWT, John Mueller from Google states it may take 6 months to 1 year to have them expire from GWT.  The video is very interesting - you should watch the whole thing.

The other thing to remember, GWT is really overall a sample that Google is offering so you can't use it as your only source.  It usually takes referencing several different databases (Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, GWT etc) to get an idea of what is out there.

Good luck!

[irvingw]

That is an incorrect assumption. Not all backlinks surface in GWT right away or ever. You can check to see if Google has indexed the pages that have the backlinks by finding those pages in the Google index and checking the Google cache date.