The development group behind the Google Webmaster Central are in over drive, they’ve just pushed out another update.
The latest addition to the Google Webmaster Central is within the tools section and it appears under the Link tab at the top. What you’ll see is an enhanced version of the link: query you could have performed through the normal Google search engine. You’re probably thinking that isn’t all that impressive and you’d be dead wrong. The newly updated Google Webmaster tools provides you with a far more comprehensive view of the links that are involved with your domain.
At the moment, the Google Webmaster link explorer is broken into two sections:
- Internal
- An internal link is defined as any link which links to another resource within your domain from within any other page within your domain. It is important to note that Google are defining your domain as your base domain name; so for this site it would be
lattimore.id.au. As such, if this site used subdomains; all links from all subdomains to another resource within the domain would be considered an internal link. - External
- As you can imagine, an external link is essentially the direct opposite of an internal link. Any link originating from a web page not within your domain is considered an external link.
Using the webmasters link utility, you can now explore how your site is being linked around the internet. As an example, you can drill down into your site and select a particular page. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to see all of the other web pages around the internet which are linking to that page. Likewise, if you are viewing the internal links for your site; you’ll only see the links for that page which originated from within your domain.
Keeping in step with all of the existing Google Webmaster tools, you are also able to download the tables of information for analysis outside of the webmaster utilities. You can download any particular table of information, such as a list of 30 links starting at the 90th link or you could also download all linking data available to you.
After clicking around within the new Google link utility, one thing that became apparent is how important it is to have a link strategy for your site. As an example, permanent links in the main navigation and the footer are benefiting the most within this site with approximately 200 links into each of them. However, as soon as you move away from the major sections – you see a rapid drop off with the next most highly internally linked page sitting at approximately 120 and most normal pages within a 10-60 link range.
Now that we have a utility which provides webmasters with such an accurate view of their sites; it seems like a really good time to start evaluating and formulating new strategies for internal and external linking.