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Google Webmaster Links Tool – Don’t Rely On It 100%
I’m using the Google Webmaster Console to do some analysis on a site. I’m trying to identify pages that can safely be excluded from web crawl and indexation so that I can target those pages that I want to rank the most.
The Webmaster Console contains a ‘Links’ tab that *should* give details of the external ad internal links Google sees for your site. It’s a handy tool, even more so seen as Google has long since bastardised the link: operator in normal search.
While Google has said that the console may nor return all results it has data on, I find it really difficult to understand why a page which is linked prominently from the homepage of the site in question (and one with the highest TBPR) doesn’t appear in the console?
Lesson to be learnt: Don’t rely on the Webmaster Console for 100% of your link data.
I found the same thing. I prefer using yahoo site explorer for tracking links back to sites.
Comment by David Behan — June 7, 2007 @ 10:45 pm
Hey David
Funny – before now I always looked on SiteExplorer as the poor man’s backlink tool. I may have to revisit that view in light of Google’s problems.
Rgds
Richard
Comment by Richard Hearne — June 9, 2007 @ 8:12 am
I have been noticing the same. But Google only says it provides a “larger sample”.
Perhaps a script to merge the list of links from Site explorer and webmaster central and remove duplicates would be accurate enough?
Comment by Dave Davis — June 15, 2007 @ 3:44 am
Might be, and add into that a nice PR and anchor check and you could have a nice tool.
Comment by Richard Hearne — June 15, 2007 @ 8:29 am