Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Google is notorious for giving weak results for backlinks to a site using the link: command. They just released a new link tool as part of their webmaster tools that shows a lot more links to your site than you can see using the normal link: search. They say that it's still not all the links they know about, but it's a lot more than they used to offer, so it's definitely an improvement.

Danny Sullivan has a pretty comprehensive overview of the new link reporting tool.

I've tried it out just briefly and for most sites I've checked it provides a lot more useful information, but for at least one site, the new tool isn't showing any links to the homepage of the site, which is obviously not right, since a simple link: search shows nearly 100 links. Probably just a glitch, so I'll keep an eye on it.

To use the new tool, you just need to verify that you own the site through Google's webmaster central--although there have been reports that you can access link data on sites that you don't own. I'm sure they'll patch that hole quickly if they haven't already.

Labels: google, links