Discover your links
You asked, and we listened: We've extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google had already experimented with a related-links feature in 2006. Opening Webmaster Tools to a substantially larger sample of inbound links shifts link discovery from a public search query toward site-owner reporting.
The announcement was also carried by Search Engine Land and the Official Google Blog, indicating that expanded backlink visibility was a salient concern for search marketers and publishers.
First-order effects
- Site owners gain a larger Google-sourced view of which pages and domains link to their sites, replacing the narrower picture available through the link: query.
- Google Webmaster Tools becomes a more useful destination for diagnosing a site's search-facing link profile.
Second-order effects
- SEO practitioners and publishers can base link-audit and outreach work on Google's reported sample rather than relying as heavily on the public search operator.
- Google gains a closer working relationship with webmasters by making data about its crawl and indexing view available inside its own management product.
Third-order effects
- Search platforms are becoming operational dashboards for publishers: visibility into how a crawler sees a site becomes part of managing search distribution, not merely measuring rankings.
The trend: Google is moving webmaster support from public search features toward authenticated tools that expose more of the platform's view of a site.