Google Lifts The Veil On Links .. A Little Options

[bwelford]

A post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog reveals that you can now learn more about the links that Google has indexed for your own site if you go to Google Webmaster Central. They don't reveal all but give many more than with the search for link:www.mysite.com

Perhaps someone can explain why Google still keeps playing games like this.

I'm still slightly confused. Here are the results for two of my websites.

Site A
Google link: shows 124 inlinks
Google Webmaster Central shows 12,846 inlinks
Yahoo Site Explorer shows 10,112 inlinks

Site B
Google link: shows 452 inlinks
Google Webmaster Central shows 19,367 inlinks
Yahoo Site Explorer shows 54,941 inlinks

So do we now know more?

[A.N.Onym]

They explicitly say that links to supplemental results won't be shown and that's one area I'd like to look at (for e-commerce websites, for example). (on a side note, an option to see just showing supp results from a site should be great).

I have used the tool a tad and like it. It appears I have plenty of links who don't give me traffic (what a surprise) from places I haven't heard about before (like scrapers :grin:).

It is not a clairvoyance ball, but some zooming glass for sure.

[JohnMu]

Is it just me, or is showing links to your site mostly an ego search?

If you have good logs, you will know where your visitors come from and that will tell you where your links are. If you have a new link and want to see if Google has found it, just check Google's cache for the page linking.

That said, I love to browse around in those links, I spotted some interesting ones (which seem to send almost no traffic), but once the site has a certain size (say over 500-1000 pages and over that many links) it is going to be impossible to check them manually anyway; you could only use them for statistics and trends (which can be fun and interesting though).

I do however think that this move will push more sites to verify with a Google account which is a great move.

John

[A.N.Onym]

Yeah, web stats should only be used when you do plan to use them. Otherwise, that's just narcissism.

For me, it is just fun (for now) to see the sites I have never heard of link to me. It'll pass and will be common within months, I suspect, though.

[eKstreme]

The first action I took after browsing my links and spotting new ones that don't send traffic was email a website asking them to remove a total scrape (text, images, css) of one of my pages.

Good morning to them too

P

[praveen]

Like Barry, i can say i am confused to an extent as well

for one of my sites the webmastercentral shows almost 1.5 times the number shown by yahoo.

and for another site, its showing atleast 250 links when this site has never ever been advertised and this receives zero traffic :confused:

but atleast its works

[A.N.Onym]

Praveen, you gotta remember that SEs has different indices - as much as they want to devour all the online info, they can't have it all. Moreover, as I said, Google doesn't show links to pages in the supplemental index and who knows, it may be hiding something else, too.

I have an opposite problem. The site has 100 links, has 300 monthly visitors, but no comments, incoming links or anything. As if they are bots, or something.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Feb 6 2007, 04:59 AM

[bwelford]

Certainly there can be a degree of narcissism in looking at inlinks to a given web page. However there are much more serious and useful ways of using the information.

In a sense, it is a way that you can build on what Google says it uses in determining relevancy. PageRank is their marketing term for it but in trying to understand everything about a given web page, those 'votes' from other web pages can be most instructive. How can you backtrack in research on the Web unless you know the inlinks to a web page you are studying. It's analogous to a research paper that doesn't give its citation references. I see nothing that Google would lose by giving this information accurately to everyone. To my mind it is one of the biggest black marks against what Google offers.

In a business sense, it can be very useful to try to understand what your competition is doing by studying the inlinks to their web pages. You may get a much better understanding of the movers and shakers in a market place by such analyses. I find the Yahoo! linkdomain: search excellent for this, and they are to be commended for providing such information.

[rustybrick]

Barry W. did you select "except from this domain" and "entire site" in Yahoo! Site Explorer?

[bwelford]

Barry S., I use the Search Status extension in Firefox to show me inlinks for the domain from Yahoo! The linkdomain: query is redirected to the Yahoo! Site Explorer, which by default is showing Inlinks From All Pages to Entire Site. This includes internal links as well.

[FP_Guy]

Maybe Google was having problems with its findings because when I went to check it out the tab for links was not there. They may have taken it down for repairs.

[ukdaz]

Same here... no wonder I spent wasted 10 minutes trying to find the links program!

Daz

[folex]

I had this facility this morning, I just been back to check it and they have removed the option.

F.

[JohnMu]

They had some security problems where you could see other site's links. I assume they decided to revert to prevent larger issues until they can fix it. It'll come back, don't worry

John

[Vanessa Fox]

Hi all. The Links tab should be available now. Please let me know if you have trouble.

[folex]

Hi all. The Links tab should be available now. Please let me know if you have trouble.

Come on then Vanessa, what did you do??
Welcome by the way.

F.

This post has been edited by folex: Feb 6 2007, 01:38 PM

[cre8pc]

Thank you Vanessa! Your assistance is most welcomed

[rmccarley]

I was suprised by how many links each Digg submision gets. There's the listing plus the members who dugg it plus the comments. I don't think those links count for much but it was still a suprise to me. Guess I hadn't thought it through.

BTW Thanks Vanessa - I just listened to an interview with you on webmaster radio last night.

[JohnMu]

Is "external links" the new "inbound" or "backward" links?

Which name should we be using? It confuses new webmasters endlessly to learn that they're all the same.

Is "internal links" the same as "in-site" links or is there no real name for them?

... a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.

John

[eKstreme]

What's going to happen to the link: operator now? Theoretically, there is no reason for keeping it.

Also: What will we call the list of links link: returns now? The list Google really wants to share?

Pierre