Find all inbound links with new Google tool

February 6th, 2007

Rather out of the blue, Google has added a neat new feature to Webmaster Console. For the sites you have verified and added to your console, there is now a shiny new links tab:

Clicking on this tab gives you a list of all internal and external links into your site and the option to directly download this list. Nice one, Google!

edit: Matt Cutts adds this:

• The backlink tool doesn’t show 100% of the backlinks from Google yet, but I expect the number of links that are available to grow.
• In particular, for my site I was easily able to see more than 10x more links in this new tool than the link: command gave me. The link: command has always returned a small fraction of the backlinks that Google knows about, mainly for historical reasons (e.g. limited disk space on the machines that served up “link:” data).
• You can download the backlinks in a really nice CSV format, suitable for slicing and dicing and other analysis. I believe you can export up to a million backlinks if your site has that many backlinks.
• Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. I’m going to say that again: Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. Sometime in the next year, someone will say “But I saw an insert-link-fad-here backlink show up in Google’s backlink tool, so it must count. Right?” And then I’ll point them back here, where I say do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.