Google Adds Links To Webmaster Tools
Google added a small but very useful feature to its Webmaster Tools suite yesterday. In addition to the diagnostic, statics, and sitemaps tools there is a new tab, links, which displays information about who is linking to your site.
The top level display breaks down how many other sites are linking to you and what pages they link to. In the column that shows how many people are linking to that page, every number is a link that lets you drill down into the specifics for that URL.
In two clicks you can get a list of every page on the internet that links to your site (well at least those that Google is aware of).
How frequently your site gets crawled will determine how up to date the inbound link data is. If your site just made the front page of Digg, it might be a little while before that information shows up.
There’s also a section that shows you how many internal links your site has, though this data will be heavily weighted to the pages in your main site menu since they appear on every page.
I’ve always found Google’s Webmaster Tools to be of limited usefulness because it’s very slow to update and doesn’t seem to flush its old listings very often. For instance it still lists dozens of pages that haven’t been on my site in almost a year.
However, the new links feature is very nice and makes Webmaster Tools a bit more interesting.
While I like the new Webmaster Tools, I can’t help wondering why it wasn’t added to Google Analytics or for that matter why Google doesn’t just merge Webmaster Tools and Analytics.
