Affiliate sites: getting money pages and backlinks crawled without burning quota
Affiliate sites live or die on two things Google has to crawl first: the money page, and the link pointing at it. This is the workflow we run for affiliate publishers on IndexerNow — described as a method, because the accounts are private and we would rather show you the process than quote numbers you cannot audit.
Method, not a metric. This study describes a repeatable method across several private affiliate accounts, not a single measured campaign. There are deliberately no outcome percentages on this page: we do not publish numbers we cannot show you the export for.
The problem
An affiliate site has a specific indexing shape. A handful of pages carry the revenue — the reviews, the comparisons, the "best X" listicles — and a long tail of supporting content exists mainly to earn and pass links. Both halves have a crawl problem, for different reasons.
The money pages compete in crowded categories, so they are often newer and thinner in Google's eyes than the incumbents; they sit in "Discovered — currently not indexed" while the established competitor's equivalent page is indexed within hours. The links, meanwhile, are frequently placed on low-authority pages that Googlebot visits rarely — and a backlink on a page Google has never crawled passes no signal at all. You can buy a perfectly good link and get nothing, purely because the page it sits on is uncrawled.
The failure mode is predictable: publishers respond by mass-submitting everything they own every week. That burns the daily quota on pages that have not changed, mixes junk URLs in with the ones that matter, and leaves no way to tell which submission did anything.
What we ran
- 1
Split the list in two and prioritise the money pages
Money pages and linking URLs are different jobs with different urgency. The revenue pages go first, every time — a new review that gets indexed this week is worth more than three forum profile links crawled today.
- 2
Screen both lists for indexability
Run every URL — yours and the linking pages you can inspect — through an indexability check. On your own pages, a stray noindex or a canonical pointing at a category page is the actual reason a review is not indexed, and no amount of submitting will fix it. On linking pages, a nofollow-everything or robots-blocked host tells you the link was never going to count regardless.
- 3
Push on your own Google account and quota
Submissions go through your own Google Cloud project and your own Search Console verification. This is the part that separates an API workflow from a credit-based indexer: nothing is pooled through a shared account, so your submissions carry your property's own standing rather than sharing a reputation with whoever else bought credits that week.
- 4
Pace it, and send the same list to IndexNow
Stay under Google's ~200/day per project — a steady daily cadence beats a weekly spike. The same URLs go to Bing via IndexNow at no cost to the Google quota, which matters more than it used to now that Bing's index feeds Copilot and several AI answer engines.
- 5
Verify, then re-queue only what is still missing
Re-check the batch with Google's URL Inspection API and act on the coverage state. "Crawled — currently not indexed" is a content-quality answer and needs the page improved, not re-submitted. "Discovered — currently not indexed" is a scheduling answer and is worth another pass. Re-submitting the first category on a loop is the single most common wasted effort in affiliate indexing.
What changed
What the workflow reliably changes is the thing you control: every revenue page and every linking URL has been screened, explicitly presented to Google, and re-checked against Google's own coverage data — with a per-batch record showing which pages moved and which did not.
That record is the real output. Once you can see that a set of pages is stuck in "Crawled — currently not indexed" rather than "Discovered", you stop re-submitting and start fixing the page — which is the only thing that works for that state.
Takeaways you can copy
- Money pages before link pages. Always.
- A backlink on an uncrawled page passes nothing — submit the linking URL, not just your own.
- "Crawled — currently not indexed" means fix the page. "Discovered" means try again. Treating them the same wastes the quota.
- Run on your own Google Cloud project so your submissions carry your own property's standing.
- A steady daily cadence beats a weekly bulk spike.
Run the same workflow on your URLs
Everything above runs on your own Google account, your own Cloud project and your own quota — never a shared pool. Start with the free bulk check to see which of your pages Google actually has.
Tools and guides used here
Frequently asked
Is bulk-submitting affiliate pages against Google's rules?
Requesting a crawl of public URLs you control is what the Indexing API and Search Console's "Request indexing" both do. What gets sites into trouble is the content, not the request: thin, duplicated, or auto-generated affiliate pages will not be indexed no matter how they are submitted, and repeatedly asking for them wastes your own quota. Submit pages you have a legitimate reason to want crawled.
Can I submit backlink URLs I don't own?
You can request a crawl of any public URL, and a linking page that Google has never crawled is exactly the case where it helps. What you cannot do is verify its coverage state through URL Inspection — that API only returns data for properties you have verified in Search Console — so you can push the linking URL, but you will need a public index check to see whether it landed.
Why not just use a credit-based indexer?
Credit indexers push through their own proprietary systems and shared infrastructure. The API route runs on your own Google Cloud project and your own daily quota, which means the request is attributed to your property and you can inspect the outcome with Google's own tooling. It is slower to set up and far easier to audit.