Google releases link data!

After many years of keeping this a secret, Google has now released linking data. The main reason they didn't show actual (always an estimate) external and internal links is to not give competitors an edge on how to beat you in the SERPs. They solved this problem quite nicely.

If you have a Google account you can sign-up for Webmaster Tools. This was always usefull and free of charge, and basically provided you some insights in how google spiders your site and some other features.

If you haven't signed-up yet, you will need to upload an empty page with a certain code to your website to let Google know you're the actual owner. The sign-up process is pretty straigh forward though.

But, eventhough Google Webmaster Tools was pretty usefull, they now made it even better by providing the actual internal and external links numbers. This way your competitors can not get the data and you can use it to optimize your site PageRank. (By checking if your keypages are getting enough internal or external links)

Of course Yahoo offers almost the same functionality but has filtered out similar results, because it's supplying the data to everybody, and not just the sites owner.

I think this is a great solution and will definetly improve the use of Googles Webmaster Tools.

Thanks Google!

Added on: February 7, 2007 - 11:23 am