Google Webmaster Tools reporting LOTS more link info

Much improved over what you get with link:

[netmeg]

Ran across this in my account - an extra links tab for each site, which reports a LOT more links (internal and external) than the link command. A welcome addition indeed.

Official word here [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com].

We've extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information.

To make this data even more useful, we have divided the world of links into two types: external and internal. Let's understand what kind of links fall into which bucket.

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 1:21 am (utc) on Feb. 8, 2007]
[edit reason] added quote [/edit]

[tedster]

Nice -- it's still not a complete list, but it is a very reponsive change.

Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded.

[kevsh]

One thing I noticed immediately: For Internal Links, at least for my site, it is only listing pages in the main (non-supplemental) index.

[Nick0r]

This is huge news. The link data is really useful and from what I've seen briefly, it's actually pretty accurate.

[karmov]

Wow, that's awesome. That's a very, very useful tool amongst the flurry of less than useful trinkets that they provide.

[dcheney]

Very cool. I just downloaded the full dump of external links - time to go exploring :-)

[lammert]

They are mentioning the "last date found" for each link. It would be interesting to know the "first date found" as that gives information about link growth in time to a specific page, but I guess that information is classified. But despite of that, a very useful tool.

[incrediBILL]

Yahoo Site Explorer claims I have 15K more inlinks than Google Webmaster Tools.

Looks like a little comparison is in order to see what the discrepancy is.

[ebound]

time to go exploring :-)

I've been doing a little exploring and I can see it's time to fire up the DMCA notices.

[superpower]

Bravo, Google. This is useful, particularly by including data dumps too. (Download this table, Download all internal links etc.)

I've been doing a little exploring and I can see it's time to fire up the DMCA notices.

Me too. Strange...people are taking thumbnails of affiliate content from me and then linking to me as the source.

[walkman]

Thank you google.

One question for Matt, Adam or a generic Googler :): a site links to me as nofollow (which is what I wanted) yet it shows as a backlink. Will this hurt me, assuming that too many links hurt?

[incrediBILL]

What I did see, which I already knew, was that the only "broken links" were things that scrapers have done. Scrapers write bad and stupid scripts, which break my links on scraper pages, which Google indexes and now I'm suffering with this garbage to resolve.

Initially there was a huge flood of broken links and I managed to dynamically redirect and correct most of this stuff on the fly inside the site scripts, but there's still a small heap of junk Google insists on crawling to find.

Cleaning up after scrapers is never done!

[Olney]

The information is helpful but I'd personally like Analytics to display this link info.

[vanessafox]

walkman, we're showing all the links -- although some of them may have a nofollow attribute. We do, of course, process the nofollow as well in those cases. So, no worries if you see those links listed in the tool.

[CathyM]

I like it! Found some deep links that I didn't know I had. It's great to see our own links without showing them to competitors.

[reprint]

Interesting. Google is missing some links that yahoo picks up e.g. directory links such as joeant or botw. Wonder if thats because they are discounted in google.

[vitaplease]

Great!

would be nice if you could sort them by amount of external links without having to download the whole thingy.

Nice collection of DMOZ clones

[ramachandra]

Very useful tool to check number of internal and external links which Google finds and index. I like it.

[CainIV]

This is great!

[ddwebguru]

Google give us a fantastic tool in google Webmaster account
thanks google.
though we have to see >
is it the total links of my site?
or the links only indexed by google?

[Kimkia]

Wonderful stuff. I'm able to easily see the correlation between high traffic pages, google search results, and external links to popular pages.

Conversely I can see, at least in part, why pages that I would have predicted would be more popular in google searches aren't making it. This is also a partial explanation for why some internal pages have higher page rank than I would have expected.

I was happy, and interested, to see how often links appeared in Yahoo answers, delicious, online newspapers and .edu sites.

Also, I've found a lot more spam sites than I ever realized linking to me by rote. And bandwidth bandits linking directly to my PDF files - haven't decided what to do about that yet, but something.

Very useful data, well organized and easy to access. We waited a long time for it, but it's certainly going to be a great resource for me now.

[reseller]

For all of you.. Backlinks Lovers :-)

A very important reminder [mattcutts.com] from our very good friend at the plex, Matt Cutts:

- Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. I’m going to say that again: Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. Sometime in the next year, someone will say “But I saw an insert-link-fad-here backlink show up in Google’s backlink tool, so it must count. Right?” And then I’ll point them back here, where I say do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. :)

[sem4u]

This gives much better information to webmasters. I like how I can see external links pointing to internal pages easily.

[Kimkia]

I'd agree with you reseller. A lot of spam sites showing up as backlinks with this tool for me - and I don't imagine that google gives them any weight (and I hope not, or I'll seriously begin to worry).

However, I still think this is a very useful tool if you apply a little savvy to interpreting the results.

[subhendu]

Good tool from G. I was little surprise to see so many links pointing to my site & it is 50% more than what I get from Yahoo site explorer.

[KamiKitty]

exellent, loving the new tab google! almost makes up for the godawful changes to the image serps :P

[darkmage]

Hey everyone, can anyone explain why this happens on a site:

Google Webmaster Tools link:www.mysite.com gives a really low count, in one case only about 140 (click Statistics, then Index stats, then click link:www.mysite.com)

but when you click external links the answer is about 20,000 (click Links - External links) with about 5,000 to home.

Does anyone else see this and can they explain the difference? It has been happening for a long time now.

[piatkow]

Fantastic!

As well as the "valuable" links it is interesting to find oddities such as the blogger who linked to a particular page because she liked the photo on it.

[WebWalla]

A few Spanish blogs are reporting a bug, whereby your competitor's links could be analysed by simply changing the domain name in the URL after displaying your own links.

Seems to be fixed now though.

[reseller]

Soooooo.....

Keeping in mind that "Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight";

what are the 3 most important benefits of the new Backlinks Tool, in your opinion?

Or is it just another "Number Game" Tool ;-)