I am a little late but thought maybe some of you might have still missed the latest scoop so here it is.  Many are obsessed with tracking their backlinks and some still haven’t gotten the idea that Google isn’t showing them everything using a Link: command.  We put together a simple link popularity tool that gives you your MSN, Yahoo and Google backlinks. It gives a more accurate number of backlinks than the site: command function yet doesn’t show you the actual links.  But now Google has added a tool to the webmaster center that allows us to track nearly all our backlinks in Google.

How do I get to this tool?
Login to your Webmaster/Sitemaps account at Google.  Click one of your sites urls. If you haven’t added any sites to Google sitemaps you will need to add one and then verify you own or operate it by uploading a file. This makes it nearly impossible for competitors to spy on your link popularity.  At the top lef thand of the screen there are a couple of buttons: Diagnostic, Statistics, Links and Sitemaps. The links button is the new one. That is where were headed.

Once the page loads it should show you  a lis tof URLs. On the far right should be a number link in a cell called ‘external links’. Clicking this will bring up the backlinks to that particular page.

This tool as Matt Cutts pointed out does not show all the links Google knows about yet does give us a great deal more than the link: command.  However I do think Google will be updating this. Again it is in beta mode so bear with it.  The great thing about this tool is your info isn’t public domain. That means only you can view your backlinks. A competitor cannot see them.  I think that is great. I believe that is why Google never implemented site: command as a catch-all backlink reporter.

Also as in the past just because a link is shown does not mean it has value.  I think MSN and Google both show links in their index they don’t count. For google I have proof of this.  And lastly this tool shows each individual page link and not just site links. For example it will show:

http://www.1stsearchenginerankings.com/2007/02/01/new-keyword-research-tools/
http://www.1stsearchenginerankings.com/2007/02/01/google-removes-google-bombing-results/

And not just: http://www.1stsearchenginerankings.com/

So if you hae a lot of sitewide links this could be a pain digging through. A ajex update to this tool which allows you to drop down and scruntch up a sites backlinks would be nice. For example I have a sitewide link at Google.com and don’t want those shown so I just click an arrow and it moves them out of the way. They would be easily seen anytime I wanted but wouldn’t be all shown at that moment. This is currently not a part of the tool. It IMO would be a good addition. Maybe I will let Matt know.

I think many webmasters will be over joyed over this tool.  I spent a couple hours tonight browsing it myself

This tool was implemented because of the requests so if you want to see something implemented into Google make a request. Google does listen unless it is some jibberish nonesense.  If it is useful the more requests the more likely we will see it.

Let me know what you think of the new tool.

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