4 Comments

Google’s adds Link Analysis to Webmaster Tools

Feb 6, 2007
by

Google has added a very nice Link Analysis Tool to the Google Webmaster Console as announced on their blog for Webmaster Central. I started playing around with it today and I am impressed. I have been a long-time user of Yahoo’s Site Explorer tools, but I will have to say .. now they need an upgrade. Google really went to town to bring a rich set of Link Analysis Tools here. You have to login to the old Site Maps area (Webmaster Tools) and if you do not have their Site Maps running on your site .. this would be a good time to get it going. You will need to minimally verify ownership of you site with a html file, meta tag, etc… then your up and running.

Matt Cutts made a statement that I think we all need to keep in mind as we review some of the data (highlighted in bold):

- The backlink tool doesn’t show 100% of the backlinks from Google yet, but I expect the number of links that are available to grow.
- In particular, for my site I was easily able to see more than 10x more links in this new tool than the link: command gave me. The link: command has always returned a small fraction of the backlinks that Google knows about, mainly for historical reasons (e.g. limited disk space on the machines that served up “link:” data).
- You can download the backlinks in a really nice CSV format, suitable for slicing and dicing and other analysis. I believe you can export up to a million backlinks if your site has that many backlinks.
- 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.

Good Luck and let me know what you think of the tool.

Filed under: Search Engine Marketing
  • http://www.revenews.com/mikeallen/ Mike Allen

    Very nice tool. It's amazing how much link spam exists. I'm guessing most of these links carry no weight.

  • http://www.michaelpolk.com Scott Polk

    Mike – It is a very nice tool … could always use some enhancements.

  • http://www.seostraighttalk.com SEO Straight Talk

    Do you have any thoughts on the backwards link tool (simply queried via the Google tool bar) that actually shows links from content buys?

    Why would content ads show as backward links to your site? It seems like an easy way to get inbound links unless of course Google has written them a lower influence factor in the algo.

    Your thoughts..?

  • Jonathan (Trust)

    A backlink is a backlink. You could have sites linking to yours because they think it has value and something worth linking to. And there are people who buy links on sites. Google doesn't like it and you could get penalized but most of the time it's hard to distinguish. If you have a straight link going to your site, regardless if it's natural or paid, it's a backlink. So that tool is going to pick it up.