Wow, Google seems to understand that the opinion of webmasters does matter! As of today, it is finally possible to retrieve a nice list of urls that are linking to your site.
Many of you will probably know that the ‘link:www.website.com’ command in Google doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to do. According to Matt Cutts this is mainly caused by technical limitations. Personally, I think that it might have some other reasons as well. Well, it’s still broken, but now Google allows you to see a much larger spectrum of backlinks to your site when you use their Webmaster Tools.
I’ve just checked out this new feature, must say that I like it! My first observations:
- Google apparently indexes links within PDF-files, these are reported as inlinks
- Webmaster Tools offers the possibility to export your inlinks as a spreadsheet, nice!
- The new tool also lists nofollow links, what does that tell us about the Google-interpretation of rel=’nofollow’?