Tracking your Blog or Website’s External Links with Google Webmaster Tools

Posted by: dragonblogger  //  Category: blogging

A friend of mine was mentioning to me that far more accurate than Blogsearch’s link:http://www.dragonblogger.com method of tracking links to your web site, is using Google’s WebMaster Tools another free service from Google.   Webmaster Tools will diagnose your web site, collect statistics and track all pages that have sitelinks or external links to your website.  This goes above and beyond just blog sites, blogsearch will only track blogs, but this scans everything that is picked up in google.

You can use Google WebMaster Tools to Crawl your site and make sure everything is linked properly and indexed correctly.
You can also see which Google Searches your blog or website shows up in, this is highly useful.

If you can see by the picture below, I have several searches where my blog shows #5 in the list of results, these searches included:
<i>
Homescan review
songbird ipod linux
ubuntu hardy ipod
</i>

Picture of my top 20 queries where my blog was returned:  (Click on Picture to blow it up and read it)
Top Queries

In addition and one of the biggest features is the “Links” section, Where you can click on “Pages with external links” and see all sites that have links to yours.

This first page shows you all of your pages that have links back to it, as you can see my total links is 1680 from all my pages combined.  (Click on picture to enlarge so you can read)
Google Webmaster Tools

Then if you click on any sub page, you can see the actual individual sites that link back to your site:  (Click on picture so you can read the information)
Google Webmaster Tools page 2
So I highly recommend my fellow bloggers to use Google Webmaster Tools, it is another weapon in your arsenal for tracking link backs and statistics for your web site.  As well as learning what query patterns are working best.  By learning the query patterns, you can tune your post “keywords” to help better match google query patterns.  Remember when tagging you pages to put popular queries:

Example, if you wrote a page about using an iPOD on Ubuntu Linux, you might use these keywords:
Ubuntu, Ipod, Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Ipod Linux, Ipod Ubuntu, Ubuntu iPOD, Linux iPod, Apple iPod, iTunes, iPod on Unix, iPOD on Ubuntu

You can have multiple word keywords, and they pattern match better in google.  Always have at least 10 keywords for every post you create, I try to have at least 15-20 for each of my posts.

-Dragon Blogger

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Written by dragonblogger (879 Articles Published)

Working in the IT Industry for over 10 years and specializing in web based technologies. Dragon Blogger has unique insights and opinions to how the internet and web technology works. An Avid movie fan, video game fan and fan of trying anything and everything new.

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One Response to “Tracking your Blog or Website’s External Links with Google Webmaster Tools”

  1. Damien Says:

    Webmaster Tools is a really good placed to go for advanced folks like yourself. I discovered it aways back when Google knocked my PR4 to a PR0. Through indexing there properly I was able to get my PR4 back, 6 months later ;)

    Most recently, as you know, I deleted my 3 accounts there with no canonical www and created new ones with new sitemaps with that www. In the long run it should crawl and track more accurately now. Thanks for all your help!

    Damiens last blog post..Blogging Goals September 2008

    [Reply]

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