Google Shows Webmasters the "Real" Incoming Links

Google just posted about a new feature that they are offering to webmasters who utilize their Webmaster Central Control Panel that is offered. This new feature shows the other sites that are linking to yours. Actually this tool is pretty awesome because on the main page will list the articles from your site along with how many links are pointing to them.

We have nearly 54,000 links to our homepage and then the list starts in on some of our articles with a whopping 129,000+ links in total. I’m not quite sure how it is organized, but it showed pages with our old URL format that we used very early on with CyberNet.

Each of the link numbers are hyperlinked, and when you click on them it shows all of the URL’s for the sites who link to that specific article. We’ve got 1,934 different articles/pages with links so finding links for a specific article could be a pain, but Google also thought about that. Towards the top you’ll also notice a “Find a page” link that will actually let you enter in a URL from your site and it will retrieve the sites who link to it.

So why did Google implement this feature? Webmasters, including myself, always enjoy knowing where their links are coming from, but Google’s search engine never seems to show all of the links to a specific site. For example, using Google’s “link” operator our site shows 2,830 incoming links…that’s only 126,000 links off . The Google blog post about the new feature says that the link operator returns a “sub-sampled list of backlinks.” I’m not sure why it doesn’t return all of the links, but it probably has something to do with spammers.

Anyone can sign-up for one of the Webmaster accounts to view this information and it doesn’t cost a thing. In fact, their Webmaster Tools offer a lot of useful information including how often Google crawls your site and how many pages it views each day. If you have the urge to know more about the site make sure you head on over to Webmaster Central!