In my first post of this series I talked about the benefits Google Webmasters Tools has to SEO when using the Search Queries Report. I will follow that post up talking about a very useful feature that WMT has, “Links to Your Site”.
I don’t think this really needs that much introduction because the name gives it away, but put simply, this report tells you the links from other sites that are pointing to your own site.
Everyone who works in SEO wants to know who is linking to them and to what pages. Many a time has been spent complaining about the lack of links that running a link command search on Google shows, so it was a great surprise to see the detail that Webmasters Tools shows you.
When you log into Google Webmaster Tool, click on “Your Site on the Web”, then “Links to Your Site”.
This will then show you a list of your pages, with a number to the right of them. This number is the amount of links that are pointing to that page. As shown below:
By clicking on a number this will then show you the actual links and the the date they were last found.
This is astounding detail in comparison to the link command. On one site Webmasters Tools showed me there was 307 links pointing to it, where the link command annoyingly only showed me 31. Interestingly Yahoo link command (the SEOs friend) showed me the same as Webmaster Tools, but not to which page the links were pointing.
Webmaster Tools goes one step further as well, it will also tell you the anchor text of the links that are pointing to the site, although it doesn’t attribute it to particular links.
I was very surprised to see the detail that Google went to with this report. Lets hope they expand and beef this up in the future.
