Google Adds New Ways To See Your Links
Google has added a new feature to Webmaster Central, letting you see a lot more of the incoming links for a site you own. You get a larger set of links than Google shows the public (although still not all of them, since Google is sure you’ll do something naughty with the list), and you can do a few cool things with it already, like download the list as a .CSV file for importing into Excel or some other spreadsheet program. My, imaging the data-mining possibilities…
So, question for Google, why in the world can’t we see ALL of our backlinks? We’re grown-ups, we can handle it. We promise, if we see something that we shouldn’t, we’ll close our eyes and pretend it was never there.
We can’t see ALL backlinks because the internet doesn’t work that way, obviously. If you want to be positive all backlinks are available, you’d have to make sure you have a copy of ALL the content on the internet, which would need to have an age of 0 seconds. It’s impossible. The web is generally not a push medium, it’s a pull medium.
I assume Andy actually meant “ALL backlinks Google knows about”, and might that not already be the case with this new feature?
I have to say I’m very sad the link:-command has become worse and worse, at one point in time it did indeed return a lot of links. No, wait, scratch that: my latest test returns a lot of links again.
I guess it’s my bad for not using the link:-command anymore, because it stopped working (and my Google Toolbar does not have easy access to it anymore, because I don’t want to see the PageRank box - shame on Google).
Comment by Tim | February 12, 2007