One of the common requests I hear from webmasters is “Why doesn’t Google show me most or all of my backlinks?” Well, as of today, Google’s webmaster console will now let you see your site’s backlinks. Major props to the webmaster console team for this new feature. A few things to know:
- 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.
I’m sure that there was more that I wanted to say, but why don’t people start playing with it and give feedback or post backlink tool-related questions? I know that the webmaster team reads to get feedback over here too; congrats again to that entire team for providing this. If you want to start browsing your site’s backlinks, sign up for Google’s webmaster console now.
{ 281 comments… read them below or add one }
Great! I’ve been waiting for this to happen.
I do not assume that just because I see a backlink, it’s carrying weight – but it does make me grow as a person.
Matt
Have visited the webmaster consol. Very nice adition indeed. However, few questions:
“Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.”
- Does that apply also to the backlinks we see on link: operator?
- Or… should we regard link: operator dead
Sweeeeet! I knew my site had more than three backlinks. I think I actually prefer this to Yahoo’s version too.
>do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.
Indeed, because even links with the “nofollow” attribute are being shown.
I’ve been using Referer.org for this purpose for a long time (almost a year I think). Referer.org have the same features as Google, but also includes an invaluable service to me – RSS feeds. By subscribing to the RSS feed for my own pages I get a notification whenever I get a new link to my page, including a screenshot of the page. And it optionally lets me put the list of referrers on my own page. When can I expect that Google gives me notifications when I get a new referrer?
Great to see more information coming out in the console, and a very useful tool for performing analysis on site content.
For me a good enhancement would be the ability to filter by the life of the link. Don’t get me wrong though – this is great.
How long before a full blown API to the entire schema I wonder…
Hi Matt
Do links pointing to images count as linbound links. They are listed in Yahoo tool but not in Google links tool.
Great addition..
Does this include rel=nofollow links? I realise google woulnd’t follow or assign any weight to these links, but that doesnt mean it wouldn’t record the link against the url nonetheless.
ALL links from other sites are considered “inbound links”. Which links actually help with rankings though…………………….who cares!
I would say this though, if you requested the link, or added it yourself, I doubt it carries any weight.
IMO the best links are the ones you don’t even know about from simliar sites and on a *content* page.
This is a great addition to Webmaster Central. Can you thank Vanessa and team for us?
Now, I wonder if the backlinks are carrying weight?
Every time I start to think that there is a chance that Google is evil, they go and do something small but nice like this…
Well it lists even nofollow links. I guess it is true that not every link counts.
I’ve been hoping it would come a tool like this soon. I will most certaintly be using it..
Very nice addition there, well done Google am liking that
Any chance for the future that the links would display a sorta ranking based around how much they benefit the site?
hehe Or perhaps whether Google considers them good, bad or ugly?
Might help webmasters further if they had a good/trustworthy definition of what Google thinks is a worthwhile link… and what is totally useless. Nothing set in stone… but a guide.
Harith, you can get an idea of the weight your IBLs carry when you download your links to feed a pretty simple bot fetching the anchor texts and link attributes as well from the source pages. Pay attention to the robots META tag, and the link’s type-of-forward-relationship attribute, extract all values beginning with “no*”. Should give a really nice statistic.
But that’s just the beginning. Way more interesting than possibly passed page rank is an overview like which sites link with which anchor text from related pages (same or similar topic) to my pages and such stuff. Once you’ve fetched and stored all foreign pages linking to you, you can do awesome stuff, what is not possible with site explorer downloads due to the niggardly limitations.
Thanks Vanessa and fellows, that’s a really great and extremely useful tool. I’d like to have the date Googlebot has discovered each link, but I can live without this info (which I can guess quite accurate) for a while
“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).” – So, why don´t you turn on the link: command again. Still not enough disk space ……
Nice feature indeed, i asked for it on the group myself. It’s nice to see backlinks from that point of view, especially since i saw all kinds of weird words in links to my site, so it’s good to see who uses what to link to me (especially since ‘link:’ operators don’t show all my backlinks). Many thanks!
Unfortunately a lot of internal links show up as external links, too.
@Mike I assume that every backlink you see at the webmaster console is carrying weight. Why should google bother to compute those links make them visible and then just not count them?
Very nice addition. As an enhancement it would be nice if you could sort by the number of links.
To the guy reading this the next year:
).
You probably forgot to pay google for your pagerank. You can use either paypal (which is by know owned by google) or visa (which is owned by M.C. himself by now, he found out about their great revenue two years ago
Once your payment is made google will count these links again. For a small extra fee google bot will even refresh your backlinks and reindex your pages.
Nice job!
It would be much better, if I can sort by number of backlinks.
Wow this is good news. I love this new feature! Thanks, Google.
Excellent stuff, I am continually impressed at the new stuff being added to the Webmaster Tools.
It’s too early for any intelligent questions – I even had problems with the spam protection sum (5+8!!)
Henry
Nice tool. I really like that Google is developing all these tools for webmasters, even though they would probably not need them theirselfs. I already got a change request
Its hard to browse through all links of a specific page if the page has a few thousand backlinks from the same domain. There should be an option that allows you to see only one backlink per domain. While you’re at it, clicking that domain should expand to display all the remaining links for that domain 
I hate leaving comments where I seem to kiss the rear of Google all the time, but I have to, this new tool is great.
Not only does it provide an excellent insight into how my (and my clients) websites are linked but it also just alerted me to a possible issue with incorrectly aliased domain names for a client, which I had not been aware of.
So, thanks Google!
Thanks a lot for this huge improvement. It is good to see that Google is still listening to the White Hat People and not only fightin’ the Black Hat guys.
Actually though it would be better if I were able to increase the number of backlinks on one page to all and also alter the sort
Hi,
good Job. Hope the results are not out of date…
I don’t need results from Nov 2006
Cool feature, minor item for improvement: make one’s owns URLs linked, too. Right now, I see
pages … external links
blog.outer-court.com/foo … 123
blog.outer-court.com/bar … 345
… but I can’t click on “blog.outer-court.com/foo” (I have to copy and paste the URL). When I see something like “blog.outer-court.com/archive/2003_05_07_index.html … 123 backlinks” I may not instantly know what this page was about, but I might want to find out why it received these 123 backlinks.
The other feature request is that I’d like to sort my pages by external links, e.g. by clicking on “external links”, most-linked first.
“Free at last!” I think is the quote…finally a way to stop people staring at the little green bar waiting for it to move…but, as you indeed make clear, not every link is equal is it…
Well done to the team…it seems to work pretty well…
It would be nice two have more tools in the console. Everything centralized at one place..
Really great tool. I just used it to check my backlinks and found some guy who is stealing my entire site (www.cp65.com) except that adsense account in the site is now his and not mine, so he is making money and I’m not. Any suggestions on how to stop this and protect against it in the future?
here is the URL of my stolen site:
http://netroot.zgan.org:1280/proxy/nph-proxy.cgi/000111A/http/www.cp65.com
i subscribe to Dyce suggestion regarding a way to differentiate the “good” links. anyway, thx for the new tool to play!
Matt,
I can’t play with the tool. I have set up my website to redirect all inexistent pages to the homepage to get Google rid of non existing pages (which I can’t put a noindex meta because they did not exist).
As a consequence of the redirect, the site does not verify.
I will never play with the console then and rather let the others doing so.
Very nice to be able to see this data at last. Thanks for all the work Google guys!
Excellent stuff, I am continually impressed at the new stuff being added to the Webmaster Tools.
It’s too early for any intelligent questions greats alex
Does the backlink tool show a links to non front pages (like yahoo or msn ‘linkdoman’) ?
Wow. That is very cool. Internal as well as external links, ability to download. Able to see the url’s that Google has for a site…
And just checked out adding a competitors website – I can’t see the stats for his site, so cool to have the privacy. Not sure why the info could not be included in the public link command though, since the information is partially publically available via yahoo and msn. But the privacy is good.
All the nice to have’s now pop into mind as mentioned above.
- link text
- Google PR
- whether the link is rel=nofollow
(we can get the above if we spider ourselves – but why should we need to when Google has the information)
- issues or penalties applied to various links.
When analysing client websites, it would be good to know more about linking penalties. I want to help them, and never easy to determine specifically what is wrong with sites after you have done the basics of SEO. I know that its part of the secret sauce, and that until now, only limited information about penalties has been shown on the webmaster console. With linking being such a black art – so essential yet so easy to get wrong, it would be nice to know when you had overstepped the mark in that area.
Astounded that diskspace was an issue. At long last we have mention from Google that its resources are not unlimited. But I must say, this new initiative must take up some storage space! Thats a good amount of data. Thanks.
Matt,
a site links to me as nofollow (which is what I wanted) yet it shows as a backlink /s. Will this hurt me, *assuming* that too many links from certain sites hurt rankings?
thanks,
Oh no! There are backlinks to my site with things like fascism and sex knowledge in the url. I do hope that Google recognises them as Wikipedia clones and discounts them.
Seriously – this is a useful tool. Thanks very much.
There is a slight problem with dynamic sites. For example – for one of my pages, the tool is showing 15 links from a local government site and 10 from intute.ac.uk, which I would count as one each. It is just their search tool throwing up different ways to get to the page.
Can you see me chuckling? I am.
Google has “always” been super duper great at public relations and creating a webmaster/owner buzz. This is a super PR buzz indeedy! LOL
I guess this new tool is good for people to play around with, but useful? I think some of you need to actually get out more.
Google states that the backlinks shown all pass different weights and some pass NO weight at all, so using the word “useful” is kind of not helpful. Even the link command has never been useful as the links shown “may or may not” be passing any juice. The word I would use for the new tool is “fun”.
In my opinion this simply creates a whole new way of complaining about your positions in the serps and asking the question of… “Google shows 10 kazillion backlinks to my site but I am nowhere to be found on my main keywords” !!! WHY?”
It really makes no diff what disclaimer Matt and Google puts on this new tool as the questions will still come fast and furious.
Kudos to Google for knowing what trips the triggers and the buttons of the webmasters and site owners!
Useful?… erm, hmm, erm, hmm, …… I say “fun”.
While we are on the subject of the webmaster console:
- Why is the highest PR page of my domain, shown to be a sub domain page??? Should only show the specific domain, and not subdomain information???
This is an excellent tool. Previously i was using marketleap.com and it showed that google provided some backlinks to the site but when i went to link: http://www.mysite.com is came up zero ???? and now! WOW thanks google and for the heads up Matt
Hi Matt from the post above;
a site links to me as nofollow (which is what I wanted) yet it shows as a backlink /s. Will this hurt me, *assuming* that too many links from certain sites hurt rankings?
I had to reply. See my post above. This is the type of thing I’m referring to. Google is going to show you any and all links as backlinks. Google knows about the backlink whether or not it’s a nofollow link. As has been stated by Matt and Google, just because a link is shown to you does not mean it’s doing anything for you. You are right to state that a site linking to you “might” hurt you in some way, but don’t believe for a minute that Google is going to tell you which links are doing what, where, when, how, and why for your site.
The tool is “fun”.
One feature suggestion:
Let site owners tag bad links as spam.
For example, many sites scrape Google search results and use that as their ‘content’. Google could use this new tool to have webmasters help identify these sites.
nice to have the new link info. i would like to see the link data grouped by domain with link totals for each domain linking to you, then be able to drill down to see the individual pages linking to you.
Matt
thanks to u and google and google webmaster team, nice tool, it helps me
my query is that the links showed by google are indexed only by google or it’s shows any search engine can indexed (the links)?
thanks
Deb
Excellent tool Matt, thank you.
As a very strange corollary to this tool, I was able to find a few sites that were scraping my content in full that I hadn’t caught before.
Like the others said, if you could add the ability to sort the # of backlinks column that would make the tool even just a little more functional.
Throwing spammers a bone?
Thanks for the new tool info!
I think it’s great for webmasters to have knowledge about their inbound links and have this information private at the same time.
There were also some “nofollow” inbound links listed which I think is a good thing.
I discovered Google’s webmasters tool with the help of this article and there is great ones there. But the baclink one is useless in my opinion. If the links can’t be listed by weight what is the need of that? I will continue to use MSN’s linkback query in the future.
Great Addition to the Tools, Thx
Keep up the Great work!
From your quote “Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight”, how can we know for sure that a backlink is carrying weight then? Is there a way to find out how?
And from Walkman question and Doug reply, i thought that a rel-nofollow attribute means that Google should not follow that link at all, how come it’s still showing as backlink then (To me it seems as if Google has followed the link).
This is great! Thanks for the post Matt!
Just noticed the tool yesterday and already checked it out on all of my domains, very nice and helpful. Thanks for opening up the link info.
In my account of Google SiteMap in view external link, if I change the second parameter of the URL mydomain.com to otherdomain.com I can see all the back links¡¡
This information should be privated, no?
sorry by my english.
Lino Uruñuela of Spain
It’s nice to finally see how many links Google sees. Yes I know, it doesn’t mean they all carry weight, but it does shed some light on the mystery of Google’s view on backlinks. It will help me out as well. Now I can compare the links Google sees in all and the ones Google deems worthy to my site.
Thanks!!
I was playing with this yesterday afternoon Matt and was wondering why you hadn’t mentioned it here;)
This indeed is a very welcome tool and helpful, although it would be nice to seperate which links are nofollow, but I’m not going to complain. (yet)
I really like being able to see what pages people are linking to, this way if someone is linking to a discontinued page I can ask them to correct the link.
Tell the Team I give them a thumbs up, great job.
LOL Aaron. It certainly gives the link mongers something more to discuss.
There is a bug in the Google Sitemaps.
If you click to view the backlinks, after you change the URL in the second time, where it(he,she) puts mydomain.com you put another domain and it gives you his backlinks.
This is a great addition, what determines the order of the links? They don’t appear to be in order by alphabetical, PageRank, or last found. Can you give us any indications?
I like that you’ve grouped all the links from the same domain together. Did you consider collapsing links from the same domain, then providing an indication of how many links are from that domain and an icon to expand them? So you could have a list of links like this:
[ 76 ] http://www.forum1.com
[187] http://www.forum2.com
etc
Feature Request: All sorting based on link quantity.
Should have read;
Feature Request: Allow sorting based on link quantity.
Matt, will the number of pages listed for a site grow with time?
At the moment I see around half for one site not listed. This site shows roughly the right amount in the index when doing a site:www.blahblah.com search plus it has a sitemap listed in the webmaster console.
This is a great addition, what determines the order of the links? They don’t appear to be in order by alphabetical, PageRank, or last found. Can you give us any indications?
I’d say that answer would be “no”. I guess if people begged Google enough, Google just might tell you all the very specifics of the current algo.
damn. No way to edit a post. In case anyone doesn’t know, the first paragraph in my post was suppose to be in quotes.
Now that is what I call a useful tool!
A fantastic addition to any Webmaster’s armoury and it’s certainly made Webmaster tools a destination that every webmaster should visit every day!
Lee
I WANT A DAMN GOOGLE COFFEE CUP.
That’s COFFEE “MUG”.
hehe sorry, having a strange week…
Matt, you forgot to give yourself credit for providing the open forum for feedback for future features of Webmaster Tools as stated in the opening volley, “You asked, and we listened…”
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-webmaster-console-goodness/#comment-88318
I’ve blogged about some features I’d like to see and will add them when you have an open call for more feedback.
Meanwhile, good work webmaster tools team, and I bet things like this are helpful to webspam team as well.
PS Aaron you can have your coffee Mug, I’ve got coffee mugs, I need that Google ipod!
My Link tab just dissappeared. I checked my links and now the tab is gone.
Matt, I’m no longer seeing the Link tab. I did see it when I looked about 16 hours ago; there are other Webmaster tools which don’t appear for all domains, such as “Common Words”; I’ve never seen an explanation as to why… is the same thing happening with the Link tab?
I’d also like to see if a link is tagged with the nofollow attribute.
I have visited Google Webmaster Tools but the links tab does not appear.
I verified my site months ago, and the other tools work but the ‘new link tool is missing’
why is this? surely its nothing to do with a .co.uk domain is it?
Thanks
Where is this new tool? I’ve clicked all over my webmaster control panel and all I can see is the old Index Stats page with the link:screenrant.com link on the page??
Vic
wow, google giveth, and they taketh away. It’s gone now. Wonder if someone found a way to use this data in a way google hadn’t intended?
Sounds like a great tool, any idea why I don’t have it in my console? I have 3 different sites that I use the webmaster console for (all with different logins) and the links tab does not show up under any of them. I’ve tried logging in and out of each account and I’ve tried using different browsers.
Hi Matt,
Excited about the new feature, but I’m not seeing the “Links” tab for any of my sites. Looks like someone before me had this problem, too. Maybe it’s down again temporarily?
Thanks for everything you’re doing!
Ethan
Sean, The links tab is gone because there is a bug where it would show links to any site you wanted, not just your verified sites. See Philipp’s blog for more details. I hope the fix that and reactivate soon
Sean, they just removed the link tab (most likely) due to an error that allowed you to see all the links of a site that wasn’t yours.
Nobody mentioned it here yet, so I figured I would.
While it’s not really personal information (aren’t links public information?) I can see why Google wouldn’t want this bug to exist.
I expect it’ll be back when they change it to do a server lookup based on your login instead of just having code look at URLs.
Seems like a bug of this sort (changing URL parameters) should have been caught in testing no? That’s one of the first things I do when visiting an application… try changing URL parameters and see what I can find.
I spent about 10 mins looking for this and could not find it! Has it been taken away?
Will it be coming back?
Paul
I logged into all my accounts this morning, and found no ‘Link’ tab. I did find a non-secure items warning on every click. What’s going on with the new tool?
[ Matt, is it OK if I use this opportunity to make people aware of my site? If not, I apologize and feel free to delete my post... ]
If you like Google’s tool, you may be interested in my Link Leecher search utility:
http://linkleecher.com
It’s a tool to grab all the links from a webpage – which doesn’t necessarily have to be your own. Link Leecher has been online for a year now, and it’s available as a Google Gadget.
I think the tool is great and is very helpful. The only recommendation that I have is if it is possible to put some kind of filter that will allow us to see just the .com links? The reason I ask this is because sometimes you may have 1,000’s of links from one site and it could take awhile before you find other domains. I must have clicked the next button for about 10 mins before I could see a set a links from other sites. I see the same problem with yahoo so I think that feature like this would really set apart from the backlink tools out there.
Hmmm… Either there’s something wrong, or I have missed something: I see NO “Links” tab on my webmaster console. My site IS verified.
Would someone give me baby steps to the correct page on the console?
Thanks
William
Hi Matt
I see no links tab too
Its been taken down
Just confirming that the Links tab has been taken down. I saw it 2 hrs ago, and now it’s gone. I checked multiple domains, thinking perhaps the Links feature was not fully rolled out yet, but it’s gone from all the domains I have access to.
Yo Dougie!
Fun? Only fun? Is this then your admission that you dont know how to use information for analysis?
While my Google serps have always been very good, I still get far more traffic from links than from search engines. Cross checking this info with log file info, comparing what Google sees to what Yahoo sees, comparing the serps of the link to traffic, etc. There are many ways to determine the value of a link beyond “carrying weight” and this adds to the data set.
Thanks Matt, Vanessa, et al.
It’ll be up again shortly! I’ll definitely keep you posted.
Thanks everyone for the feedback. We’ve been hearing lots of great ideas about what you all would like to see regarding this data and we’re furiously taking notes!
This link tab is back!
martin
OK, this may be a question more for my peers than for Matt.
A. Why did most of us want this feature?
B. Did this feature answer A?
Not complaining here, but I’m just curious… why go through so much trouble when the result is still “nope, not really, not 100%.” I can’t think of many good reasons to look at back links other than to identify link partner/source. If someone can enlighten me, please do.
Kirby, even w/out Google and Yahoo showing you back links, your server log would’ve told you what site are providing you with the most (or the best) traffic. I still don’t see an added value in this feature.
I checked it out as soon as they put it on their blog.
The tool is cool but it shows nofollow links the same as regular links. it would be really useful if it showed they type of link instead of just the number. So far it’s a pretty nice tool but needs a little work.
Thanks a lot for the sitemaps team for providing this feature.
This is great (even considering all the grains of salt with which we’re instructed to take the news)! More information is always better than less.
The links feature is incredibly welcome… THANKS!
I like the previous comment of letting webmasters flag links as spam…
But one addition that would help would be to be able to organize the links by referring site. If another site puts a link on every one of their pages it can overwhelm the listings of links making it hard to notice the interesting ones…
Wow! Thanks to the Google Team for this absolutely awesome addition. Mine is working perfectly and I am totally amazed at the links I did not even know we had and had not picked up on, on the “other” SE we have been using to check backlinks, so it appears to be far more comprehensive. Thank you to everbody responsible for this.
What I love the most is that this is private info. (I hope it stays that way, please?). And I love that we can flag spammy links as spam. Thank you all.
This looks great, its been really useful so far. It looks like the pagination doesn’t work entirely, though. Clicking on page 3 of 6 yielded the “No results found” error. Then page 4 was really just page 1 and page 5 was really page 2…you get the idea.
How are these sorted? By relevance? It would be nice to see a way to sort by count. But so far this has been really useful. Great job!
Interestingly on my most trafficed and linked site the tool shows no links to the homepage…
For a feature request I would like to just have a list of the domains that link back, and when you click the domain it expands to show the page. Both yahoo and google show 100s of pages from the same site sometimes which is kind of… not so fun to sort through. I am almost comment number 100, so I don’t even know if this will get read.
I’ve got to admit a fun AND handy tool.
Not so much for me, about how many links I have (not many), BUT very handy tracing those occasional 404 errors where someone has linked in to your site with a bad URL.
Previously, I had no idea of where the error was coming from, now I have a chance of finding and correcting it.
Cool
Thumbs up Vanessa, this gets full approval from my team.
Thank you Google! Scoring some major points!
I think that by sharing more Google is helping to slow down black hat practices. Of course, there will always be black hat, but it most SEOs and webmasters don’t feel like they have to “figure” Google out there less of a chance that they will be sneaky. Through Google Sitemaps and now this Google has come a long way toward being more open and helping SEOs instead of working against them. My nephew was just born less than two hours ago so I can’t focus any longer. Imagine – He will never know a world without the Web.
Hmm, since this announcement, my site http://www.cidnetwork.com which has been in google’s index for 10 years has suddenly lost all backlinks and is not even indexed anymore.Is this a glitch or is it that after 10 years I have broken some sort of guideline?
Just yesterday , everything was fine. Cidnetwork was no#1 & #2 for ‘toilet problems’.Now it doesn’t even show for its own name.
Feature Request:
The reverse of rel=nofollow for webmasters to disavow any association with a site linking to them. For example, OneCall has a site linking to us that is in the porn industry and we want no association with them. You allow webmasters the option of ref=nofollow allow us also to list sites in our webmaster tools account we wish to not be considered associated with for Google PageRank algorithms.
Feature Request:
Download data in .csv format (similiar to AdWords or Google Analytics). I had to Choose a Program and there may be a subset of people that can’t figure that out.
Feature Request:
Allow a toggle of ‘All Inbound Links’ and ‘All Weighted Inbound Links’. We don’t have to know how many points or crazy things like that but knowing what is being counted and what isn’t would be powerful.
Question:
Matt states that it doesn’t mean the sites are carrying weight. However, OneCall is on every major price comparison engine known to man and none of them show up in our inbound links report. I know that most of them are using technology to block PageRank points so I have a hard time thinking that some types of nofollow are still being used to filter the inbound links results.
Seems to have raised more questions than answers, even know Matt twice bolded the all-important bit
Still, there’s no discounting the Placebo effect.
Wow, hate to do a ‘me too’ post, but goodness gracious me, this is the coolest thing I have seen Google do in a long time. I can’t believe all this data was sitting in a vault somewhere and it’s only just seeing the light of day. Splendid work.
If I don’t see a link, can I assume it carries no weight?
Which is a completely the opposite of what you told us.
Eventually someone will notice that “nofollow” is a useful part of the Internet’s linking structure and use it in search engine rankings.
Why do I get the feeling I’ll now have a comprehensive list of all the bulletin boards, and guest books, in the world that were exploitable 12 months ago from all the pharmaceutical spam sites I took down last May from our trial hosting service. Still who knows, I’m sure Matt probably knows some folk who’d pay for such a list
Any reason the number of internal links shown is limited to 200? It would be handy to have the full number as a check on sloppy webdesign:-)
The external links are great, it’s relly interesting to see blog clusters and the like.
This is a great addition to Webmaster Central.Thank you Google! Scoring some major points!
I get this urge to start doing social media spamming when I look at the few links pointing @ my pages.
What does this all mean?
I am serious BTW Vanessa, how is this data of any value to the idea you guys pushed to webmasters (who try to play by the rules) of “earned organic links”?
I believe that just like with PageRank this new feature will make people chase the wrong bird…and maybe to some extent that is a good thing.
Lots of mixed messages coming from Google in the last few days, you guys better get a handle on it before it grows into a monster.
How about showing links to supplemental pages? It’d be interesting to know which links do not work or where we need more of them. As a side note, it should be a good idea to see only supp pages of a site via a special supp: command or something (Thanks).
Oops, I just asked why the internal links count was limited to 200 per page, and then I found a single page which had 201. Still seems to be some sort of filtering going on with the internal links, but I guess it’s not a hard ceiling.
Kicking myself for not following you into Wordpress back before I only did a few posts ithrough Blogger. Now I’ve got over 300, they’ve changed the rules, and it would take a ton of work to move. They are now insisting on saving FTP passwords for third party sites which would stink if they got hacked. Got any Blogger migration products you can suggest:-)
“Kirby, even w/out Google and Yahoo showing you back links, your server log would’ve told you what site are providing you with the most (or the best) traffic. I still don’t see an added value in this feature.”
Nutseo, I know that, but I deal with less than adequate log/stats for some consulting clients. Also with this tool I am seeing links that are redirected through scripts ( for ex: http://www.notmydomain.com/subcat/out.php?site=10000000) that I couldn’t ID with logs before. I was surprised to see these links show up. They dont appear with Yahoo’s tool.
Hmm interesting addition Matt. I have a question which I posted at my blog. Could Google use ajex(or whatever. It doesn’t need to be ajex) to allow us to minimize or maximize a particular site? For example if I post at a forum and I have 5,000 posts I don’t want to see all those pages my link is on. They aren’t why I post there. So I want to be able to up and down arrows allowing me to max or min a particular site. What do you think?
Regards and get some sleep
I am really happy to see this tool under the web master tools, It’s really a great start and you have helped alot to the webmaster like me to save thier time in getting the link back details by querying from link: to google search box.
It will be great if can show the IPs group wise ( c class) in external links. Then it will great help for the website. And If there is genuine content rating tool in which webmaster tools will shows the website content in the slider (like you have in the crawal rate) then it will be great.
I am kinda confused, is back link and incoming links the same?
Very nice and handy!
It’d be great if change since last week / login / whatever was built in?
N Katz, the short answer is that the backlink tool gives you a lot more information to spot stuff like this. Now that you know about it, you could do a DMCA request, for example. In this case, I’d be happy to ask someone about it; my hunch is that we can get that proxy sorted on Google’s side pretty quickly.
Hi Kia Niskavaara, Why don’t u try Google Analytics instead of referer.org. I know the RSS/notification feature is still not there and I hope Matt & Vanessa are listening to this request.
But I’m sure, no other free service really matches Google Analytics. BTW, I myself use a combo (Google Analytics + Awstats).
Best of luck!
________________________________
This is obviously a reaction to the Yahoo Backlinks tool – Please don’t react to others – implement as soon as a need is demonstrated
Sadly, there are vital flaws with this welcomed, new Google tool
Advanced Google SEOs are just too sophisticated to be satisfied by a common links checking tool – such as the Yahoo or MSN checking tools.
Advanced SEOs need a way to further analyze the results:
This is what would suit SearchEnginesWeb:
☻ PageRank Info for all links…
☻ Filtered results by PageRank and Age of BackLinks
☻ Anchor Text Keywords Analysis
I know you’ll do as I wish
Well done. This quickly became my 2nd favourite tool from GW (first being the “Query stats”). A quick enhancement (as mentioned by other commenters too) is to be able to sort these results by no. of links (or by date where applicable), so that we wouldn’t have to import this list into excel and play with the sorting.
Matt
It looks like you and Vanessa have started a Backlink Hysteria
I’m really afraid the new Backlinks Tab will encourage webmasters to worship backlinks and PageRank etc… forgetting all about valuable contents, crawlable and user friendly sites.
And if “Sometime in the next year, someone will say; who have started all this?” And then I’ll point them back here to this post
Yes, it’s nice for a start. But -
1) Should be able to sort links by date FIRST seen
2) Should be able to sort links by TRAFFIC (assuming use of Google Analytics)
3) Position of link on page would be nice (ATF etc)
4) Type of link, e.g. Text or Picture
5) PageRank of page containing link
Thanks
William
Matt, I’m a Google fan and always have been, still am
At 1st I thought this tool was a good move. However I can now see this as a bad move and Google doesn’t make many IMO. The reasons being, the flood of questions pertaining to link weighting, PageRank etc being asked. IMO it will encourage link spam and email spam (requesting links) BIG TIME. That not good for Google, Webmaster and least of all searchers.
I don’t believe for a second that the reason the advanced link operator was only returning a sample of links due to server space. I believe it was a conscience choice made by Google and a smart one.
Matt, I’m sure you will pass on the praise but PLEASE also pass on the dissaprovals (Adam, Doug & Myself). PLEASE
Hi Matt,
Finally Google give us this information.
Since the use of the Link command was many times useless we needed to visit Yahoo to get more information about links.
Keep up with the good work.
PS: For instance, put again the API Search available or we need again to use de Yahoo API.
Regards
MAC
the link tab has alerted me to a site
which appears to have hundreds of links to my site. eg one of those links is from http://www.petexperts4u.com/Llialn/nutriI
I don’t know whats going on, their pages appear meaningless and just clog up my tidy list of inbound links!
is there anything I can or should do?
Thank you
Awesome
am liking the new tool so far
from your line your hammering into us
“Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.”
Does this mean you can confirm that the links seen currently in a Google link:www.domain.com search, these links do hold weight?
Very nice. It doesn’t do everything I would like, but its a move in the right direction.
I like that it showns inside links as well, I can think of some troubleshooting sessions where this might be handy.
Thanks to the team
Totally agree. The large numbers of posts in this thread telling Google they want more and more and more should tell Google something. It’s uneeded hysteria at the least. It will only serve to get all of us countless more numbers of spam email requesting links, etc. I cannot see the tool as a good thing at all. Sorry. Simply reading all the posts in this thread about PR and link weighting, etc and you know exactly what the tool will do. It’s one thing to be more open with sites, but quite another to further the link frenzy. As if it wasn’t crazy enough out there anyway? How can we “teach” stuff about having a great site that searchers actually want to find if people think that all this amounts to is the number of links you can get?
I have no desire to use the tool personally. Truly have no need for it.
Sorry Vanessa.
Hi Matt –
The results seem to be somewhat erratic – for instance, yahoo shows approximately 1000 backlinks to http://www.utheguru.com, which has been up and running for 6 month, whereas another of my sites http://www.thescapeartists.com (about a month old) shows 2 –
WHEREAS..
In Google webmasters tools, utheguru.com shows no inlinks whatsoever, and thescapeartists.com.au shows 1.. what’s the GO there?
It is good to finally see more of the backlinks Google knows about.
I have also noticed that the Yahoo SiteExplorer is including backlinks even though the nofollow tag was included on the link.
SEW
☻ PageRank Info for all links…
If page a page rank of the page has nothing to do whether Google recognize and value the link, why bother about it.
☻ Filtered results by PageRank and Age of BackLinks
see over for pagerank. Age of backink: may be interesting to know which links were added in the course of last week, last month.
☻ Anchor Text Keywords Analysis
Probably the most natural links won’t have the anchor you want. I don’t think it is of interest of Google to value the anchor too much. I think it would be much more interessant for Google to value a link through the scope of the linking/page, anchor being important if you don’t already have the word on your page (which a limited power to avoid Google bombing).
Like if a page is talking about things that are likely to be unrelated (like viagra + car insurance + weight loss), the link and the anchor would be disregarded (up to the exception of maybe somebody offering viagra for people looking to loose weight with a good looking car insurer – just the idea of it should be censored here).
I like the tool very much. Would be “cool” if the site’s page having the links PR was displayed along with the link.
I don’t recall saying anything. Oh yeah, that’s right…because I didn’t.
Sorry…getting over the flu and my head’s still cloudy. So if this is somewhat incoherent or wrong, blame whatever stuff I’m drinking or taking.
Maybe it is the flu talking, but I don’t totally disapprove of the tool as such. The reason I say that isn’t because of what it appears to be but what it really could be.
The tool in and of itself may seem to be of relatively little use in that it encourages silly things like link exchanges, triangular link swaps, co-op schemes, DP schemes, text link schemes, etc. and so on. But what if that’s what this tool was meant to flush out? In other words, the tool itself might be more of a trap than an actual tool.
If that’s the case, I’m all for it. Let people fall into the trap, as some will have to do no matter what they get told, and either they learn or keep falling back into the trap.
If that’s what it’s there for, then I can see a logic. Mind you, that’s about the only scenario where I would see one. And I wouldn’t expect a direct answer on this either. Just something for the link-hounds to think about…you may be sucked in.
I just don’t see any other reason for this tool being built the way that it is, with what appears to be a Persian flaw that is bound to create havoc. Why add to the PR-hysteria unless there’s a greater goal behind it?
So if not all backlinks are carrying a weight does this mean that only the ones you can see without the backlink tool are of any use?!
Happy to hear of this tools existence anyway – i always liked the yahoo site explorer!! Useful but a little bit over the top….
Googles webmasters tools are way better and i think more intuitive, more people should realise the best way to rank well on google is not using rocket science or tricks but to use the systems designed by Google for that exact purpose….and lets not forget blogger.com
Multi-Worded Adam
“Sorry…getting over the flu and my head’s still cloudy.”
No worry!
Last time Matt had a cold he recovered at once by following of drinking boiling water
btw.. Canadian Adam! long time no post
Multi-Worded Adam
“Sorry…getting over the flu and my head’s still cloudy.”
No worry!
Last time Matt had a cold he recovered at once by following Canadian Adam’s recommendations of drinking boiling water
btw.. Canadian Adam! long time no post
Ever log into Google adsense and notice the little timer that tells you the last time it was that you checked your earnings? This silly link tool might also remind SEOs of their link building obsession yes?
Anyone seen the images of Vanessa Fox hanging out with the folks over at SEOmoz? I believe Google has good intentions but this is bad PR for those of us who are not part of this “popular” SEO crowd.
I hate Google and SEO again today, got to look for something that makes more sense and doesn’t make me feel bad. ;-(
Hi Matt,
One of the backlinks that see in the new links tool that I would imagine carries weight is mattcutts.com. I am wondering if these backlinks might negatively affect my Google presence and if so, is it possible to have the URL removed from my prior comments on this blog? The tool is great and my appreciation goes out to the Webmaster Tools folks.
Great service!
In the section Diagnostics in webmaster tools, google lists a number of URL’s that were not found. As a webmaster I would like to find the pages where I accidentily linked to URL’s that do not exist in order to fix these broken links. I tried to look for the URL’s there were not found in the overview of internal links…. but I have the impression that the broken links were filtered away
Here is my suggestion for further approvement: show broken links. It would be a great service for webmasters and it would make the web better crawlable for search engine spiders
Good question @ Aaron
“This silly link tool might also remind SEOs of their link building obsession yes?”
webmaster update – great! thanks
MW-Adam, I only suggest adding the PR number because it seems an easy thing to do. I realize it plays no part in SERPS. I do like the tool because it shows me links to internal pages I have I would not have checked for before. I read the content of the forum posts discussing the links to my internal pages and get ideas how to adjust my content further.
This is very nice and I was delighted to see this happen. My only wish for the future is that we can share our Webmaster Tools account on a restricted basis, like Google Analytics, with others like clients so that they can see their backlinks without seeing the whole list of sites we manage for other clients.
Very impressive! Good thing you pointed it out Matt, I had been logging in but wasn’t expecting a change and glanced right over the links tab. Thank you again, this is a major step.
Thanks for the heads up Matt!
I’ve been using Yahoo to get more detailed linkback stats… but now I can get it straight from Google
Matt, I have found a bug in google. I have a screenshot of it, but don’t know how to get it to you. It is coming up to random to just give you a url or I would just give it to you. It also seems to be happening with a number of sites. Thanks in advance.
Which in turn makes us even more suspicious.
Seriously though this is a great new feature. For those wanting to sort in this way or that and wanting to be able to better mine the data, this is why Google provides an option to download the link data via a CSV file. If you don’t like the way Google sorts it, download the CSV and manipulate the data to your heart’s desire using your favorite spreadsheet or database program.
That’s an awesome tool. Will really help to know what websites link to you ? But the actual question is are visitors using those websites to find you at all ? or are those websites are been fed to only search engine crawlers?
Googlebug?
My sites are all showing as unverified, and the verification system is apparently unavailable…
Before I lost access to the webmaster tools I noticed some strange behaviour. One of my blogs A Word A While http://awaw.blogspot.com/ didn’t show any links from my other blog http://jambecorp.blogspot.com/ but every page on that blog does (the link is in the side bar). Any explanation? I can check in again after I get my sites re-verified. It appears that the links show up with a link: query…
AWAW does seem to rank rather lowly in google, it ranks below several link pages link “blogflux” listing my own site when searching for “A Word A While”. That doesn’t seem like the best search results to me. I’m not really making money off any of my sites so it is just a matter of personal interest rather than losing money, but it would be nice to figure out why the results are as they are…
Lew look it.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-provides-backlink-tool-for-site-owners/#comment-96338
This bug has been removed.
> My only wish for the future is that we can share our Webmaster Tools account on a restricted basis
Omar Khan, you can do that – just let your clients sign up for their own sites
Uh, does it have some problems if you’ve set the preferred doman tool to be non-www. and all links go to http://www.?
The Google link: command gives me a few backlinks, but this new tool gives me both no internal and no external links.
I see the difference in results between link:domain and this new feature on Google’s webmaster console. Does this mean here was will see better updated results?
anyway its a useful feature..
This is a huge improvement. I have many links that I could not determine if google knew about. Now I know which ones they are aware of. Regardless of the weight they carry, at least I know which ones they have identified.
Harith: I hate you for that.
Seriously…that’s what I did (that and the non-concentrate OJ), and I got over in a week what is taking everyone else that got the same thing 3-4 (I actually got it last, and am the only one so far who has killed it).
Tom: my comments were more general than directed at any one specific user/person. I know that you know that I know that you know what you know, but what about the 5,000,000,000 people who don’t know that? That’s basically my angle.
Nice tool. I have downloaded the table and see more backlinks!
Thank you ^-^
Matt, Dave Taylor (askdavetaylor) told me to ask you what’s up as he cant figure out my Google rankings either, and at my wits end I will…
First, thanks for this feedback on backlinks… Second, see:
> I rank really well on yahoo and msn for most of my key search terms. I have
> cleaned up my site, checked all my backlinks, submitted to quality
> directories, i don’t spam, and I (think) I’m totally legit – and google hates
> me, they always have. I’ve stripped my pages bare, and reordered everything, I
> rank no where for anything, and someone told me I have a huge penalty. No one
> seems to be able to tell me why. Oh please can you help me. I really don’t
> know who else to ask now. www . naturallyguaranteed . com
[Dave's reply] Looks to me like Google knows about 75 pages on your domain, but you’re
right, they definitely don’t rank at all. Looking at it, though, I really
have no idea what’s going on. Perhaps you can drop an email message to Matt
Cutts at Google and ask him if he has any ideas? You can find him through
his weblog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
obviousy I couldn’t find you email – and I’m not surprised… please delete this post, and answer me if you possibly have two minutes sometime before July?
I hit 104 degrees and fried my brain this/last week (that is 104 even after taking 4 Ibuprofens), felt like I was dying as my body convulsed on the bed with chills and sweats.
Ever get so sick that you re-evaluate your entire life during that time?
RE: “I hit 104 degrees and fried my brain this/last week….”
Drinking boiling water would have reduce that to 100 degrees
Great tool folks and many thanks. Can we attach any weighting, significance or analysis to Google’s listing of our *internal* links?
I think internal internal links ONLY would be the best. Sadly, as it is, this is only going to add to the link obession most have.
This is great! I can finally see who Google believes is linking to me. It will allow me to gauge where to concentrate my link building efforts, as I can now understand which types of sites Google deems important to my site. One thing I found was that all those del.icio.us bookmarks for my sites are actaully indexed by Google.
Mike, as stated 3 times in the post, “Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight”
This is brilliant! I really like this tool. As mentioned previously above the addition of a pagerank for each link would be great but hey let’s not be greedy. Great job!
Hi All,
it is just The Begaining of this tools in Google so you can expect more that what you can imagine in the next update.
but really Well Done Google
“Matt, Dave Taylor (askdavetaylor) told me to ask you what’s up as he cant figure out my Google rankings either, and at my wits end I will…
First, thanks for this feedback on backlink”
Laura – the reason why Google doesnt like you, is because of your product pages.
Look at this for example:
http://www.naturallyguaranteed.com/store/comersus_viewItem.asp?idProduct=41
You dont describe whats in the product, its ingredients , or any proof that the product will work. In other words , its very similar to a spam website.
Now you could be 100 per cent legit , but the first thing that popped into my head when looking at your site was “spam”.
Hi Laura (f-lops-y);
You don’t need Matt to tell you what is what. You just need someone who knows something. Viewing your site; .. first site; “nice” site/design. You are doing some things wrong that are very, very basic. You may want to find a real good se discussion forum to ask for a critique or something. To me; some things are extremely obvious and you just haven’t had any real good help as of yet.
Pass along kudos from a happy user. This is a great, and long overdue feature. Yahoo Site Explorer is so … Yahoo. This is what we need to make sure we know what’s going on on our site.
Hi Tom;
…………”Pass along kudos from a happy user. This is a great, and long overdue feature. Yahoo Site Explorer is so … Yahoo. This is what we need to make sure we know what’s going on on our site.”
Overdue for who exactly? Please tell all of us exactly how this benefits you. No really, I truly wish to know exactly why you have to know who links to you? Can’t you simply view your logs to see the referrals? What exactly am I missing? I’ve been in this industry going on ten full years now. Guess how many times I’ve felt the need to use “any” type of backlinks tool for my site or my client’s sites? That’s right; I’ve “never” felt the need. That is; I’ve “never” felt the need. That’s right. “Never”.
So again; I see many, many posts in here saying how great this is and how great a benefit it is to know who links to you, but I’ve yet to see a post outlining exactly what benefit this is to the webmaster or site owner.
Isn’t knowing exactly what your visitors do when they find your site what it means to “know what’s going on with it”? How does knowing a link is leading to your site help you to “know what’s going on”?
Ask me how many times I request a link from “any” site to my sites? That’s right; “Never”.
Many, many are thrown BS in this industry. Many, many truly and totally do not “get it”.
Sorry; but I only speak my mind…. and the truth.
same thing here – also 10 years in the industry – and i’ve NEVER requested backlinks from anyone. sure, if somebody is reviewing one of our products and the review goes online, i just make sure that the link is accurate, but thats about it. my main concern has always been the user experience and secondly , can the search engines spider my site effectively. thats about it.
Very good Jason.
I’m not including the few quality directories that I guess you can say a link is requested by submitting to these “few quality” directories. lol
We should start a new group of protestors. “Down with Backlink tools. Down with Backlink Tools.”
Nothing else seems to work as the huge amount of “link mongers” out there will never go away. The large amount of BS in the industry won’t go away either as many firms make a living off the uninformed and naive by “selling PR’ and selling links and fueling the link frenzy. Take away the frenzy and all these firms would not exist. I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of a firm who makes a living off the naive though. As each day passes, internet users and owners get smarter.
I think that backlinks is the one thing that Google does wrong.
Thank you for the excellent article!
I believe that good backlinks with authoritative and relative themes resources only for the benefit.
This is great.
But where’s the “rss feed for newest links” for us link junkies?
I think the backlink tool is a great addition.
Hi Matt,
would be great if the tool actually worked. You state it undercounts the number of links. It really does. On my website’s home the internal link and external link count are both 0 despite that it has 7000+ pages (all having a home link) and that site:… reports 288 and link:… reports 58. Also Yahoo! reports 1404 inbound links.
Well, may be the google data center finds some more links in the corners sometime in the near future.
Thanks Matt & team! Mine now shows links seperated into external, internal by PageRank and much more! This is GREAT!!!
Sorry Astrid, that wasn’t it.
I think it is about time! Great tool.
It would be nice if the PR of the external link was displayed. I could do this with a little bit of code why nto lit you do it.
Looking forward to the day when G Webmaster Tools is an essential, just a few more analytical tools and we’d be there. Maybe a graphical display of your site map with some info on each page beside it. Help us analyze our sites. Also, why isn’t there a Sitemap Generator in the webmaster tools? And a GUI to edit it?
I noticed this feature the other day. Its great how there are new features just appearing every few weeks. The Webmaster tool is starting to become really useful in debugging sites and improving them. Thanks webmaster tool team. keep it up.
Lew you’re forgiven.
Errioxa = Lino Uruñuela of Spain discovered the bug on Google Sitemaps.
Hi Matt.
This is an excellent new tool, thanks to all the guys on the team for doing this. Can you give us any idea how often the data in the links section will be refreshed?
Kind regards,
Andrew.
Tried this backlink tool, it’s very useful especially for tracking “lost” links that search engines missed whey they crawl.
I have tried using his tool on several sites that I run for myself and others, but it only lists one or two back links. I know there are many more that are ranked by google. How can I see the missing links please?
I love the new data but I was wondering when does the data get refreshed for backlinks? Is it monthly?
Thanks,
Arthur
Matt, I have checked out my links and google has some big errors. They have hundreds of url that are under my link section. The problem is my site isn’t listed on these pages. Could this be a reason for my penalties?
As we say in Southern California STOKED!!! For someone relatively new to this game like me, I have put a ton of work into creating links the past few years (the honest way!), and wondered if they were even found by Google. Although Google may not take all of them into account, I am still thrilled to see that the GooBot found them!
I did also find it very interesting that the very first one I clicked on had a no-follow tag. Feel free to comment if you have not allready on how google views these no-follow tags. Are they penalized, ignored, or do they help?
Great tool, so thanks!
dk
Hi Dr. David; Since you are “new” to this stuff,… why do think it’s a good thing that you see the backlinks? How does this benefit your website? Do you see visitors in your stats program that come from links?
I’m really curious to know exactly how seeing these links are helping people out there. I must be extremely stupid, huh?? LOL I just can’t understand the benefits of seeing some backlinks when I already see the same links in my stats program. That stats program is called;…hm, erm, “Google Analytics”.
Yes; it actually shows me all referrals coming from my backlinks. Imagine that? No need for Google to tell me what links I have coming into my site. Go figure?
Internal links are limited to 199?
Doug Heil Said, if you exchange links with other sites you need to know the links that link to you and Google Analytics don’t show you all the links at all.
Errioxa said:
…if you exchange links with other sites you need to know the links that link to you and Google Analytics don’t show you all the links at all…..
Of course it doesn’t as that is not the point. Only quality incoming links are going to give you referrals, right? Only quality incoming links will show up in your stats then, right? Any link that is “not” a quality link is not worth anything anyway, right? Google will not give you any credit for a link that is not quality. Remember what Matt stated in his first post;
“do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.”
Read that again, and then read it again and again.
To summarize; An incoming link that is “quality” gives you referrals. You will see the same links in your stats programs. Any other link is not worth two dimes so no need to worry about them and no need to even know about them. Hence; there is no benefit to knowing ALL incoming links Google happens to know about since links not of quality don’t count for much anyhoo.
Let me know if I am missing something.
Ok, you shuold exchange links with a site of the same contest and the trust rank should be worthed.
I also belive that the total number of links that point to your site are the more important.
New tool is great but still doesn’t show all back links!
i think it shows backlinks before last update
I would also like to be able to see only one inlink per domain.
Most of the links to my main site, are from another, closely related (in fact it used to be a section of the latter) site of my own. There are also links from things like blog sidebars. The result is that it is very difficult to get a list of what sites are linking to me – short of downloading the CSV and doing a considerable amount of processing myself.
Hi!
You have named it Webmasterconsole/Link and I like it,
But I hope there comes some more extensions.
With sitemap.txt can I tell you urls
With what I can tell you the new links in the right catagorie?
and I asked me when I read above from Errioxa:
…if you exchange links with other sites you need to know the links that link to you and Google Analytics don’t show you all the links at all…..
why the three tools that could show you the backlinked links Google has
all count different?
link:www.light2art.de official,
that is what every one can see and what counts
link: http://www.light2art.de inofficial,
that is what every one could see (if he know it) and some counts
and third: Webmasterconsole
that is what only the Webmaster can see and it counts
but in there the links are such presorted, that the weight they carrying highlighted me wrong
and a can’t see a logical pattern in it,
than that Google means :
a lamp can’t be Art and that my lamps aren’t out of glass or agate,
because no links there counts.
Every time I get in there a sitemap-bot get my identify.txt
but also an 404 error on a try to get an file named noexist_******.html
Someone a idea what that means?
Or should I try to make a file such name
and test it what than will be happen?
Greetings
Karl
HI!
I try to post this yesterday but it failed for some reason,
so I try it OUNCE again
because I think this idea can help to clean much errors :
After I wrote this above I looked in my stats
and I found this two times:
72.14.195.150 – - [25/Feb/2007:10:48:02 +0100] “GET /noexist_*********.html HTTP/1.1″ 404 619 http://www.xxx.de“-” “Google-Sitemaps/1.0″ “-”
(Sitemaps is looking after my authorisation
for the WebmasterConsole)
this brought me to the an idea:
Is there any bigger reason,
why a bot from the top of the list
can’t give (on a way like above) the Site-owner a link to a HTML-(whatever)-document
on your server, where he can find data from your bots perspective of the last crawl?
There must be no anti-spam-secrets , but some data about errors between us would be fine!
A real 2-way conversation between human and machine while learning from each other!
I think such a service can teach a lot people (in an easy way)
how to become a clean and valid Site in your opinion.
So that only the absence of related links or content can retard the Site
and after this process Google can easier divide white, grey and black hat.
Greetings
Karl
I have tried using his tool on several sites that I run for myself and others, but it only lists one or two back links. I know there are many more that are ranked by google. How can I see the missing links please?
Great, The new tools does show more backlinks for my website now.
However why hide the relative weight of backlinks, If this information can be made available under the webmaster tools it may be useful for somebody to optimize his/her website better.
I very much like the Back links tool as you are able gauge with a much degree of accuracy the sites linking to you.
I understand not to make the assumption that these back links are carrying any weight.
Q.Wouldn’t it nice if we could also see the PageRank for each individual link?
Just a bit of eye candy!
I think Yahoo’s Site Explorer should require a login. They are undoing Google’s good work by making back links publicly available. This is why I do not assume just because a back link is there it caries ant weight. So let that a message of caution to spammers.
Talking about caution, it appears that Microsoft either likes being in the courtroom or has selective memory: Microsoft is not playing fair by taking unfair advantage of the Vista Operating System and make Live the default search. – (Uncle Sam is coming for you)
I have always regarded Google as “The People’s Search Engine”. As they dream-up innovative tools that address there core business values.
And for all the people who blame Google for their sites disappearing from the index, poor SERP’s etc the list goes on … Read the Webmaster Guidelines!
Pass along kudos from a happy user. This is a great, and long overdue feature. Yahoo Site Explorer is so … Yahoo. This is what we need to make sure we know what’s going on on our site
Great News, Seems its lacking features though
Hi!
webmasterconsole tells me
that there are 47 links to index_en
that there are 46 links to index
that there are 1 link to links_en
that there are 1 link to downloads_en
that there are 1 /menschen-ohne-Baeume.html
and so on.
but on the other place inside the same console it tells the truth
link:www.light2art.de
and it say to every one:
Google saw here only 1 external Link!
This is so for month now, where do you think ,
should furthermore my and my potential linkpartners motivation come from?
Greetings Karl
I have a question about back links. My site has about 30 affiliates with linked banners promoting our site. My question is why dont any of these count as back links. Is because each banner is linked to an specific page for each individual affilate?
The links are to sign up pages specifically for each affiliate, the sign up pages do not have direct link to them anywhere on the site.
It seems to be working. But Yahoo! still finds way more backlinks than google.
Yahoo may find more backlinks but Google is still a much better search engine overall. I added my two newest sites to the webmasters console but they’re not showing any of the backlinks yet, however both of my sites are showing up in the SERPS for my keywords on the first page. I’ve been creating websites since 1992 and I previously used a lot of Flash, JAVA, javascript and other eye catching elements and usually my sites didn’t rank well in the search engines. However with my newest sites I’ve been using strict XHTML, minimal design, making sure the sites validate properly and all of a sudden the search engines are picking these new sites up very quickly.
I’ll be patiently waiting for my backlinks to show up in the console as I’m not certain if something is changing at Google (in accordance of the reappearance of the greybar), but the backlink checker sites I was using up until the update last week were working fine, now it seems they’ve all stopped working. I’m wondering if this has something to do with why my sites aren’t showing any backlinks.
Anwyay, the console looks cool enough !!!
at seems to be working. But Yahoo! still finds way more backlinks than google.
I can see a few hundreds backlinks through the webmaster console. However when I use the link: command it returns nothing. Any suggestions?
I’ve been signed up to webmaster tools for about a month and if i look at my links through yahoo site explorer, i have over 140 backlinks. Yet google webmaster shows me diddly squat (nothing) and the same if i type link: in google. Is this because my site is new or a fault with webmaster tools…?
Yes, Google webmaster tools is a great tool for webmasters. What I never understood is: what is the “statistics” has with Page rank?
I use this feature and it is very useful.
Oh i stand corrected… Google webmasters has picked up all my linksss. It is showing nearly double as what yahoo site explorer shows as well. Kewl
Hi Matt,
I was wondering.
What’s the difference between:
link:www.somesite.com
and
link: http://www.somesite.com
notice that the second example has a space between the colon and the start of the domain name.
I notice that the second one gives FAR MORE back link results than the first one above. Why is this?
Which ones do Google Count as a link, the one from the first example or one from the last?
And how does it decide which links to show up?
I mean, I did a link check on Brad Callens site, wow, over 500 back links. but if you type in with a space like the second example, over 12,000 show up.
Then I took a look at the 500 or so back links and notice that my site was also there on the second page of the google results. But when I check my site, Brad’s site is not listed in the back link check even though it is there. Why does Google decide to credit one person with a back link and not for someone else?
Thanks.
Loz
Is there a fault with Google webmaster tools. Over a period of the time the backlinks have gone down. Ok maybe Google is rationalising a few of them but my confidence goes a little when I display external links say at 30 per page and when I click next link for the next page and 31 – 60 is not displayed. I go back to the top level showing the link amounts (external and external). Is this a general problem?
hi Loz!! You register google Webmaster Tools and see how many backlinks are there in your site. This will give acurate. The google webmaster link is webmaster tool
Hi mobilephoneshoppe ,
I’m sorry, but that doesn’t answer my question… I’d very much appreciate if my question could be answered. This answer is like finding gold dust, even the top seo experts do not know the reason why there are two different set of results.
Thanks
Loz
great! Thanks for providing this facility in google. I think this google seo tool really help many user to check their back link. Thank You
The link: feature is ok but when i try to check one of my sites http://www.cadshelters.co.uk, it finds nothing unless i take off the www. On the webmaster tool the feature is grayed out, other sites i have let me use the feature. Why is that, does anyone know?
Ok i have found out that google no longer display backlinks publicly so when i go into webmaster tools and check the links it works ok and i have 70 odd at the moment.
I am not the webmaster but the SEO person for several websites. The webmaster was able to give me the # of links using the tool. It really works. You can also go to Yahoo and type link:domain.com and get some decent results.
Dear,
I have some issues.
1. when i checked link:http://inside-n-outside.blogspot.com in google i couldn’t find a single link, while that is around 300 in webmaster tools… why?
2. I am not assigned with any page rank.(for the last 7 months)
3. All the other sites is showing many links, and am able to get in to the first page of yahoo results for many keywords as well.
Why is this all happening? Am a lot confused about all these stuffs.
The integrated backlink checker of google does not really work probably. WIth external checkers i do have more results than with goolge’s!
I experienced the same problems. THis tool is not really accurate. BUt which one is it? I think no tool will be able to define alls backlinks exaktly!!
It’s about time they added something like this. Their “link:” command is about worthless compared to Yahoo.
yeah, this has proven to be a great tool for webmasters. The site: function has never shown a backlink to my site, yet the webmasters tools shows hundreds!
thanks for the hard work and continuing improvement
Matt
really great!!
very thanks…
“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).” – So, why don´t you turn on the link: command again. Still not enough disk space ……
Alos, Google just had an update on the number of links it is showing publicly.
This article may help me! Thank you for posting!
Ye it is a nice new tool but I really need to know how much weight my links are carrying. We’ll just have to ‘weight’ for Google to show a little further kindness.
Yeah a good post … but m unable to increase my backlinks but at least i can check my backlinks
Matt,
You mentioned that up to a million links could be exported.
Well the exact limit is 1,048,575
The reason for that limit is because that is the column limit for Excel 2007.
I would be interested if anyone knows a work-around this limit, or if some other software allows me past that limit.
there is a huge diference between iwebtool backlink checker and google tool for backlinks
Matt very thanks
Wow its about time they added something like that, all they need now is to show us the weight of each link since thats really more important than the amount of links…
I have been waiting for a tool like this for a long time, thank you for a very nice post.
Hi that’s sounds interesting i have a new site and was able to list in google and yahoo in just two days i have a no of back links to my sites but when i use the link operator it shows me no backlinks in google a few in yahoo and alexa will this tool my problem and i would know how many back links do i have
My question is that i have a no of backlinks to my site but the link operator and the webmaster tools shows me that i have no link however yahoo and alta vista shows only a few any suggestions?
Nice tool. My problem is, when I am involved in a project where I am not the webmaster, but a “SEO-peasant”, how do I get authentic backlink datas? And why in the name of heaven is there a difference in the link: command and the backlink tool datas?
And what if I want to collect authentic data about my competitors backlinks?
Sorry for the batch-questioning.
Matt, maybe a late comment – but this info is soo valuable for us WMs, as is the new WMT feature to identify the origin of the URL-not-found errors. I have been able to do soo much cleaning-up because of these two functions.
Thx
S.
This is great! I need to increase my site backlinks and it’s really hard..
I have been using iwebtools link checker and google’s webmaster tools for some time now and I don’t believe that either actually show all of the links that you may have at any given time. I would love to find a tool that gives 100% accurate data about this.
I have got 0 backlinks from google and from yahoo i am getting 47 and from msn i am getting 0 and from altavista i am gettingn 1. what are these number says .
Please tell me.
Matt has 10x more backlinks displayed in his reports in webmaster tools but I seem to have 40x more backlinks than the link: operator , if not more…
Even the no follow links are been thrown up. Displaying only the ‘weighted’ links would do more good to webmasters
Is there a way to find out if any of my social book marking is giving me back links? None of them come up in Google.
This article answered a lot of questions for me on backlinks and Google. Always a great source of information!
I’m not sure why but my WM tools are not showing any of my backlinks to my homepage, and I know that I have hundreds. What could be causing this?
So, how I can use Webmaster Tool when i want to survey competitors site ’s back links?
My website have 200 or more backlinks but having no page rank, i am totally confused what happens. Now i will check my website google backlinks. Thanks for very informative and helpful information, keep it up good work.
Using Webmaster Tool is a great option but one hindrance here is that if we wanna analyse other related sites and the number of backlinks on them then this falls out of place, after trying out some permutations and combinations I’ve come up with the following querry, though not 100% exact but it’s quite close, try this:
allinanchor:”harmonicenvironments.com” -site:harmonicenvironments.com
Rule of the thumb here is to navigate to the last page of the search result so and click on the
“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 270 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”
Click on this and then once again navigate to the last page.. and Bingo we’ve got the exact result.. (216) for this site as of today..
I hope this helps..please provide feedback
Using Webmaster Tool is a great option but one hindrance here is that if we wanna analyse other related sites and the number of backlinks on them then this falls out of place, after trying out some permutations and combinations I’ve come up with the following querry, though not 100% exact but it’s quite close, try this:
allinanchor:”harmonicenvironments.com” -site:harmonicenvironments.com
Rule of the thumb here is to navigate to the last page of the search result so and click on the
“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 270 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”
Click on this and then once again navigate to the last page.. and Bingo we’ve got the exact result.. (216) for this site as of today..
I hope this helps..please provide feedback
Site explorer is a decent tool for checking backlinks. You can also use the linkdomain: operator.
@ above Site Explorer do not show all links, its a better tool if u want to see backlinks of sites other than yours
Matt,
even before improvement of webmaster tools it was great.. the new updates to it are just awesome..
Just one problem if you can fix (country to display have just one country selection option ) if we can have option like target language wise or target to show in multiple countries.
We know google will show the results as per accurate content relevancy and content but still in case if we wish to target just chosen countries to display.
i recently cloned one site at two servers ( .com.au ) (.co.nz) with two different addresses ( offcourse pointing the target country for both as per address. but i wanted to have multiple options to choose to target contries.
Really interesting.. Thanks for sharing this article here. Thanks once again.
Thanks for this. I was looking for some backlink checker for my sites. Never realize that the Google webmaster tool currently has a built in backlink checker
What a nice surprise.
I have 2 websites:
http://www.bigvivah.com and http://www.matrimonialmatrimony.com
i have submitted it to most of the directories, article submission and Press releases, while searching google I can see all those links, but webmaster central of google shows only 3 links for past 3 months.
i am totally confused, why google is not showing these links?
what is the frequency of google updating these backlinks? pls help.
ganesh
Webmaster tools is definatelly a great tool, but some aspects of it are not as reliable as they should be. It does provide wealth of information, but compared to google analytics it does somewhat weaker job. For instance if you compare keyword traffic and most aggressive keywords that drive traffic to your website, that is where you see a difference. Also as I find backlink statistics page does not really show all of the backlinks to your website as to compared to organic search with your domain name. I would say it’s a great tool and must have tool but should be used as supplement only.
Thank you
I try to check back links with Google but when I put my URL, it is actually the keywords that show, not only the links. What do I do wrong?
I use Webmaster tools mainly for keyword analysis. the inbound links part is weak.
at inbound links even yahoo is better
Thanks for the info, didn’t realise that google master tools had a backlink checker tool. Thanks for the tip
Dave (Original) said…
“I would say this though, if you requested the link, or added it yourself, I doubt it carries any weight.”
Oh goodness…I didn’t know the all knowing Google could now read our minds and discern the intentions of our heart. That’s a new one. I will have to look around and see if I can discover any insight on how Google has come to be able to do that. That’s quite amazing.
Carlos
Oh double goodness. I wasn’t going to comment again but I just had to say something in response to another comment…I am partially bored and feel a need to express myself.
Doug Heil said this…
“Nothing else seems to work as the huge amount of “link mongers” out there will never go away. The large amount of BS in the industry won’t go away either as many firms make a living off the uninformed and naive by “selling PR’ and selling links and fueling the link frenzy. Take away the frenzy and all these firms would not exist.”
May I humbly suggest (seeing as I am on Google Matt’s own blog) that this link frenzy is being caused by nothing less than…well…Google’s own over reliance on incoming links as a barometer of content relevance and value?
The best way, though not the easiest, is for Google to come up with another metric to assign value and relevance. Oh I know all about the 200 other metrics that Google takes into account but backlinks, quality backlinks, is a BIG one if not the main one in my opinion.
They have made backlinks a commodity through their algorithmic reliance on it as an indicator of value on the web. Is it really that surprising if poor souls who are trying to eck out a living start trying to get some of that good ol’ link juice coming their way or fall into the trap of believing that everyone who offers them a backlink is offering something of great value?
You want to take the frenzy out of people falling all over themselves and each other trying to get one more backlink in whatever way they can get it (an approach I don’t recommend by the way)? Have Google devalue links. It’s really that simple.
Carlos
its really great news, google itself provide tool to check backlink, thanks google
Thanks for the post , didn’t know that google master tools had a backlink checker , but why do these backlinks to google keep fluctuating , the number of the links seem to be different even every 24h
thanks for the tip anyway!
I’ve been waiting for a reliable backlink tool from the wonderful Google. I look forward to trying it out.
Thanks,
David
i don`t understand why backinks are not in webmaster tools in google account ?
Kanrak,
i find that yahoo always shows more inbound links. I even downloaded an inbound link toolbar for firefox that showed better results than google.
I just rediscovered the webmaster tools today for my websites, OMG, what have I been missing out on, Gold Matt, thanks!
I’m using Google Webmaster tools and its showing me around 400 links but i’ve linked my website manually in around 1000 websites. Is it maybe google crawlers hasn’t crawled it yet?
Do u think google checks links popularity thru yahoo? I heard it from someone. Is it true?
Hi Matt,
Is there any other method to add google backlinks?
Firstly, this post is from Feb 2007!! Why are people still amazed that Google has a backlink checker? Backlinks is one of Googles main ranking factors, every IM worth his/her salt needs to track this.
I have found different amount of backlinks from Google webmaster’s tool and from using link:domain. This has been confusing me since I don’t know where’s the valid number of backlinks to my website.
Matt,
I can’t play with the tool. I have set up my website to redirect all inexistent pages to the homepage to get Google rid of non existing pages (which I can’t put a noindex meta because they did not exist).
As a consequence of the redirect, the site does not verify.
I will never play with the console then and rather let the others doing so.
Hi, well the reason I found this Blog was I was searching for “how to get Google to see my backlinks”…
When I use various back link checkers they show that sites like Yahoo have seen and indexed my back links, but Google hasn’t indexed one of them. This is the question I think many people have.How can we get Google to see the back links?
not sure, but if people really interest in getting google backlink, you can try go into your google account and create you profile: http://www.google.com/profiles which provide you to post your web.
google provides only those backlinks where u have posted in some forums not all backlinks even i m searching for so many tools but every where i find zero result for knowing exact value of my site backlinks
though backink as state to increase web traffic and ranking, sorry for the dum question for this newbie of me… would there be any good if the backlink doesn’t relate to your web content?