Google Shares Backlink Anchor Text Info
Friday, March 16th, 2007;
-- Andy Beal |
If you’re a search marketer, you’ve never had it so good. The days of working in the dark with Google and trying to patch together pieces of software or intricate search commands, are on their way out.
Ever since Google introduced Sitemaps, which expanded to become Webmaster Central, they’ve gradually added more and more useful information - stuff we would have killed for five years ago.
Today’s addition brings backlink anchor text to the mix…
Now we’ve enhanced the information we provide and will show you the complete phrases sites use to link to you, not just individual words. And we’ve expanded the number we show to 100. To make this information as useful as possible, we’re aggregating the phrases by eliminating capitalization and punctuation.
What else would you like to see added to Webmaster Central?
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March 16th, 2007 at 10:40 am
How valuable each link is.
That might be asking a lot but if we could determine which links are worth our time that would be very beneficial.
March 16th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Well, you an get those Grease Monkey scripting add-ons for firefox that display the PR of links reported within G. webmaster tools.
March 16th, 2007 at 11:02 am
@Andy: Since Google is implementing link statistics like this it makes me wonder if they will ever remove the weight of importance from them out of the algo’s. I have read more and more lately that they will become less important but I am skeptical of the quality of results that would be produced without backlinks being a factor.
@Drew: I am not sure if they would ever do this. IMO it would simply facilitate and exemplify the gaming of the engines, to an even higher level than it currently is.
As far as what I would like to see: The actual # of backlinks for your site, with historical views over time, that would be nice.
March 16th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
I think it would be more valuable if they showed which pages that the link text belongs to. They could just add a column for “anchor text” where they show the external links to your site.
It’s not like there aren’t plenty of programs that do this for you, so I think it would help Google if they just showed this info and quit making us use yet another SEO tool.
March 16th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
I would think this is very valuable actually. Do we have to wait to see it in webmaster tools? when are they rolling this out?
March 16th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
EW - It is already in Google’s Webmaster Tools. Look under the Statistics tab and click on Page Analysis.
It doesn’t really give too much information though as far as which sites these come from or if there is a value associated with each listing. I think the other backlink checker tools out there are still more valuable.
March 16th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
hey Mark.. yeah I know i read that’s where it was, but I don’t even have a page analysis link
actually I think my whole thing is screwed up.. the webmaster tools doesn’t even show up in the ‘My services’ section when I sign in to google.. I use the same gmail login, and my other services are there, but the webmaster tools one isn’t.. do you have any ideas what I’m doing wrong?, maybe I have an older version or something (if that’s even possible)
March 16th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
You have to sign up for the service directly to enroll. Go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ and then sign in with your Google accoutn and follow the directions. If you have any problems or questions please feel free to email me at mark@markbarrera.com (that way we don’t go back and forth here in the comments) and I will help you out.
March 17th, 2007 at 6:10 am
“What else would you like to see added to Webmaster Central?”
Some type of keyword analysis would be very useful!
March 17th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
I would like to see live PageRank.
March 18th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
This is a very useful new service.
April 20th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Very usefull post. Thanks a lot for the google anchor text link…. I searched for this.