Monitoring backlinks and using Google Webmaster Tools

Getting backlinks to your website, and increasing the number of backlinks is easy if you use Google's Webmaster Tools on your site. Simply login, then click the links tab, then view external links to your pages.

Backlinks to your website help in two particular ways, they help drive traffic to your site from people who read another page and see the link to you as some kind of recommendation, and a good number of backlinks can help your site in the search engines results pages.

Google's Webmaster Tools are a handy service for reliably checking exact pages on other sites that link to your individual pages, and by getting half a dozen links you can quickly see how Google actually views them.

Let me give you an example, one of my sites is quite new, and as you'd expect of a new site, most of the backlinks go to my site homepage. However, a couple of the internal pages have been picked up by other webmasters, and in one case even on Wikipedia.

What's most interesting about the new site is the number of links acknowledged by Google as being valuable, for example making a single comment on a Typepad powered blog, but receiving credit for between 3 to 6 links because the archive and category pages are indexed separately.

Similarly, having a link in a Wikipedia page can be valuable even though you are unlikely to get the credit for it, however I've been finding several credited links from sites that clone Wikipedia pages. It seems many of these pages strip out the nofollow tag that Wikipedia adds.

Do yourself a favour and monitor your site links in GWT and see if notice the same thing. Having a better idea of how Google credits your backlinks should make it a lot easier get every link to count for more than a single link. Your Search Engine Optimization efforts will be more successful for it.

Of course this doesn't tell you what weighting Google places on the links, simply that they have acknowledged the link, so it is still advisable to take the time to find relevant in content links rather than try to fool the SERPs with large numbers of links from duplicate content pages.