14 replies to this topic

[projectphp]

Google have just launched a new tool, as part of webmaster central, that shows more links than the standard link: command:
http://googlewebmast...your-links.html

You asked, and we listened: 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.

That is great, for all those interested, and we can stop having those "link: command doesn't work" topics.

[qwerty]

It's pretty good. It'll show a list of pages that have backlinks and how many, and if you click on the number it will show you where those links are coming from. It still doesn't show everything, but it's far more complete than it has been.

[MaKa]

It's quite interesting to have a browse through the external pages linking to yours. I happened to find a page scraping my website by just having a quick browse.

[Arnie K]

Typical Google, in one nice move they now offer more link information than Yahoo! Explorer. Glad to have the data - finally!

[FP Guy]

When I went to check it out yesterday it was not available. The Google groups I moderate talked of errors so perhaps it was down for maintenance, but I see it up again today.

[Christopher]

When I went to check it out yesterday it was not available. The Google groups I moderate talked of errors so perhaps it was down for maintenance, but I see it up again today.

It's back now tho.

[LeftoverJoe]

Thanks for the link, ProjectPHP. I love that Webmaster section...so many useful things all together in one place that help make things easier for the novice webmaster and experienced one as well.

[Michael Martinez]

I agree that Google's Webmaster Central is more useful than Yahoo!'s Site Explorer, but I still don't find the information to be that useful. There are many things they don't tell us and probably never will tell us.

I can see how people who have been swept up in the link-mongering craze will love this link data, but given that they include links that don't pass value without providing any means of distinguishing them from links that do pass value, you're pretty much left with useless fluff.

[DanThies]

Useless fluff? I guess if you lack imagination.

For one site, we went through and grouped inlinks by category:
1) Link to blog home page
2) Link to specific blog posts
3) Link to business site home page
4) Link to specific business site pages

Now we can approach each of those groups in a systematic way, to expand the linking relationship, find business partners and affiliates, etc.

[Michael Martinez]

Useless fluff? I guess if you lack imagination.

Oh, I can imagine many things that people can do with the link information in the reports. I just don't expect many people to be as creative as you, Dan. After all, most Webmasters have been spoon-fed a lot of nonsense about "get as many links as you can" for years.

Do you really want to recommend to people that they expand their linking relationships with spammy sites?

You may know the difference from experience. Many other people do not have that kind of insight.

So, yes, it's mostly useless fluff.

Your mileage may vary.

[DanThies]

Yes my mileage varies... By your logic, any information that "most webmasters" can't process is useless fluff. Google could give them world-class analytics for free, and you'd call it useless fluff... oh wait, they did that too, didn't they?

I guess I'm just in the habit of giving people more credit than that. Maybe I am wrong to do so, but even if I am overestimating the intelligence of the average person, I still haven't gone broke yet.

[JohneeMac]

Mmm, on initial looks, it doesn't seem much more useful than the link command itself.

[FP Guy]

Examining the links to internal pages of a web site for better crawling is valuable information in itself then examining where those links are coming from can help you determine what areas of the web site should get more attention.

Which pages of your web site are attracting high PR sites? Should I offer more content in that area? Do these sites pointing to mine have a forum to frequent and get business from? Etc.

There can be a lot of useful information there if you know how to look at just right.

An ordinary rock can be overlooked unless you know what you are looking for to find a beautiful geode inside of it.

[JohneeMac]

Examining the links to internal pages of a web site for better crawling is valuable information in itself then examining where those links are coming from can help you determine what areas of the web site should get more attention.

Which pages of your web site are attracting high PR sites? Should I offer more content in that area? Do these sites pointing to mine have a forum to frequent and get business from? Etc.

There can be a lot of useful information there if you know how to look at just right.

An ordinary rock can be overlooked unless you know what you are looking for to find a beautiful geode inside of it.

Yes very handy! It shows 2 links when i know i have well over 20 to certain internal pages. Pretty inaccurate if you ask me.

[Carps]

The information might not be perfect (it still shows other domain aliases as external incoming links, for example) but you should be able to leverage the information - even if it's just on a broad, snapshotty level to see whether you're getting scraped, if pagerank is getting passed through your site, broken links etc.

What I like about Yahoo siteexplorer over Google is the ability to look at data for sites you don't own - and get some idea about the competitiveness of your site in relation to them. It also offers you the ability to easily report linking sites as spam (although it's still in Beta, so I can't say how effective it is).