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About two weeks ago, Google updated the Webmaster Tools link reports to provide some more actionable data and cleaner interfaces. But it left out a key metric for some SEOs, the metric of "total links."
Late Friday, Google announced in a Google Webmaster Help thread that they added it back. Jonathan Simon of Google said:
I'm happy announce that we've added back the "Total links" count in the "Links to your site" section of Webmaster Tools. Now when you go to the "Links to your site" section you should see "Total links :" displayed at the top of the page.
So now if you go to your link reports, you should see at the top, "Total links." Here is a picture from this site:
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Comments:
Pradeep
11/01/2010 01:09 pm
The only benefit of this new feature is to display the count of links from the domains to which the actual website get more links from.
Jorge
11/01/2010 02:13 pm
mmm... is it really true? i don't think that!
Will
11/01/2010 02:14 pm
This total number also includes 301's from what I am seeing reported on a few of my sites, which I guess "could" be counted as links from a metrics standpoint. And is this up to date (meaning if links go away are they removed from this total number?) or is it just the raw number that Google has found over time.
skylermalley
11/01/2010 05:01 pm
Sorry I must be a nobbie cuz I cant find total links in websmaster tools
No Name
11/02/2010 01:09 am
How reliable is the data that we get in webmaster tools? I have an insanely huge number for a site that I only lunched a few weeks ago. It can't be right...
Carly
11/02/2010 09:06 am
It might be useful to know the total links but it is the quality of the links that you build up that helps to give the site authority, so I can't really think of another use or application of this data other than an indicator.
rahulbatra
11/02/2010 11:45 am
It is just to show the links to our website, whether its inbound or outbound.