Search Engine Optimization

There is a ton of information about how to see and read your links out there but now Google itself is helping.
Google has announced the release of a tool that many thought would never come but always dreamt of – a tool that shows us our links for our sites. It has been sought over since Google changed the link command. In any event, Google has given us access to see the links of our sites – if we want. How it all works and more of the history can be found at Danny’s Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools (read it).

To access it, you need to login to Google Webmaster Console and verify your sites.

But please note that Google does not count all those links you see, for example if you see links that are nofollowed or from penalized sites or low quality sites – it doesn’t mean Google is using those links to count your score.

For years, Google’s link: command (and see here) has deliberately failed to show all the links to a website. This came out of Google’s fear that site owners simply wanted the data to try and manipulate rankings — which was pretty true.  Instead, they only provided a sampling of backlinks. Today, that changes. Google Webmaster Central is rolling out new support allowing you to view and even download thousands of links to your site (official news here and here).

Google isn’t currently showing 100% of your links but it is getting better!