Savvy Affiliate

Day 42 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Google webmaster tools are an amazing tool for anyone who is building a website.   In Part 1 of Google Webmaster Tools I wrote about how you can use the tools to find bugs in your site.  This post will be about how you can use the tools to find out who is linking to you, what pages they are linking to, and what anchor text they are using in their links.

What is being linked to?

One of the nicest features about Google Webmaster tools is its ability to to list all of the pages in your site which have external links pointed about them   This list is much more robust than the list you would get if you used Link:www.yoursite.com.   Google filters the results if you use Link:    By using webmaster tools you get the full result list, and it is much more impressive

The next step, if I want to see who is linking to a particular page, is to drill down on that page and see all the incoming link

My page on “Value of a Blog Post” got 18 incoming links.   It seems like those 18 links are from about 4-5 different sites.   Which isn’t too bad for one of my posts.  Clearly I should try to do more like that.

Finally you can look in Statistics, Page Analysis, to see what the most common anchor text linking to you is. 

Not surprisingly, my most common anchor text is “Scott”, my name, “Savvy Affiliate”, the site title, and “Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use”, which was a post I wrote for a Problogger group writing project.     Since I’m not currently targeting any keywords I can’t say whether or not any of my keywords are on here, but you can use these tools to check how well your key word targets are progressing.

Tomorrow I will show some of the statistics that are available through Google webmaster tools.