Google Debuts COMPLETE Backlinks & Forward Links Tool

[BODYGUARDS]

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...our-links.html

Finally you and only you, can see the complete backlinks and forward links to your websites.
You can download the archives from your control panel

[amar]

Thanks BODYGUARDS. This is so useful.

[timmathews.com]

nice info. thank you very much

[smo]

Excellent tool .. I will take some time to fully explore the it, but a good tool from G. This one shows more links than what I get from Yahoo site explorer.

[dak888]

Strange, the tab isn't showing up in my webmaster tools??? Is this happening with anyone else or am I missing something?

DaK

[Chris]

Dave Utter wrote an article about it for WPN. There's some good info over there.

[incrediblehelp]

Interesting they show so many links that in the past most of us were lead to believe didn't count. IBL's like signature links, blogs, directories, etc.

Just another confusing list from Google? Guess they just are showing as many links as possible and not just those that have a high weighting factor.

[Peter (IMC)]

I never figured that some of the sites I monitor have so many backlinks. At the same time I have to admit that I am glad that the link: command doesn't give that many results. It´s a lot of work to go through a list of thousands of backlinks to sort out the most important ones. The link: command does that for you,... :)

[buddhu]

Originally Posted by dak888

Strange, the tab isn't showing up in my webmaster tools??? Is this happening with anyone else or am I missing something?

DaK

Did you verify site ownership yet? That thing you do with the metas or by putting a blank html doc on your server for G. to check?

If you didn't you may not be able to access this.

[StoryCharms]

I rushed over to Google Webmaster central to check out this new feature, but found it mystifying in two ways:

First, after downloading all the external links as a CSV file, (fantastic feature!) I noticed the 'last crawled date' column contains dates in the future. Strange.

Second, there are external links listed that could not possibly contain a link to one particular site. How do I know? The page in question is a generated page dated 2005: http://gigaom.com/2005/10/03/30gigs-email-for-free, and my site was launched in 2006. Needless to say a visit to said external page revealed no link. Yet. The crawl date is for ... next Sunday 11th Jan.

So there we have it, clairvoyant spiders that can travel through time.

I'm going back to that external page on Sunday to find my link!

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by StoryCharms

The page in question is a generated page dated 2005: http://gigaom.com/2005/10/03/30gigs-email-for-free, and my site was launched in 2006.

Anyone can link to any website at anytime. The website doesn't have to exist for some one to link to it on purpose or by mistake.

Plus someone could have owned and maintained the website before you.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Guess they just are showing as many links as possible and not just those that have a high weighting factor.

I fully agree with you.

[StoryCharms]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Anyone can link to any website at anytime. The website doesn't have to exist for some one to link to it on purpose or by mistake.

Plus someone could have owned and maintained the website before you.

The first is true, the second in this case is not.

But surely the important points are firstly that the cited page does not contain a link to that site; and secondly that the date the link was allegedly found is in the future.

[michstar01]

I don't really know much about all of this, but I wonder if this has anything to do with something I noticed a long time ago and have been meaning to ask about.

If you do link: with no space after the colon you get a much lower number than if you do link: with a space after the colon. It works for site: and index: as well and maybe others.

Why would this be?

[dak888]

Yes. The tab was not showing up in the morning but a few hours later it was magically there.

Thanks,

DaK

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by michstar01

If you do link: with no space after the colon you get a much lower number than if you do link: with a space after the colon. It works for site: and index: as well and maybe others.

One activates the operator (with no space) and the other simply shows how many times the domain appears on a page (with the space)

[michstar01]

Sorry, but I don't understand the operator term. See this as an example and maybe you can help me to understand:

link:http://www.domain.com/--30 links
link: http://www.domain.com/--2 links
link:www.domain.com/--30 links
link: www.domain.com/--22 links
link:domain.com/--0 links
link: domain.com/--139 links

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by michstar01

link:domain.com/--0 links
link: domain.com/--139 links

Not sure what your seeing. Here is what I see:

link:domain.com/

This number is 6110. This is the number of websites linking to "domain.com"

link: domain.com/

OK this is 938,000 for me. These are simply the number of websites that have "domain.com" appearing on their web pages.

Please log out of Google Account before doing this.

Understand now?

[michstar01]

Actually I meant to explain that the numbers that came from above were from your kbk website. I guess I still don't understand and really don't get why log out of google.

[Peter (IMC)]

Originally Posted by michstar01

Sorry, but I don't understand the operator term. See this as an example and maybe you can help me to understand:

link:http://www.domain.com/--30 links
link: http://www.domain.com/--2 links
link:www.domain.com/--30 links
link: www.domain.com/--22 links
link:domain.com/--0 links
link: domain.com/--139 links

The operator only works without the space. With the space the results are pages that have both "www.domain.com" in the text AND the word "link". It doesn't intend to show backlinks, though there is a good chance that many of the results also contain links.

[swirt]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Interesting they show so many links that in the past most of us were lead to believe didn't count. IBL's like signature links, blogs, directories, etc.

Just another confusing list from Google? Guess they just are showing as many links as possible and not just those that have a high weighting factor.

Good point. Matt Cutts repeated this a few times and bolding it just for good measure, saying that just becasue a link shows, does not mean it carries any weight. Sometimes even nofollowed links are showing up.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google...r-site-owners/