Google updates Link: command Woohoo….

Google just updated their webmastertools features, with a new tab called link. This tab allows webmasters to view a bigger sample size of their inbound links, both external and internal links. This link tab is an updated version of the link command but more, it works similar to yahoo siteexplorer as you could narrow the listing to internal links only.

I played around with the new function and thought this is a great tool for webmasters like myself. It helps us have a better view of the sites linking to our pages, subdomains and websites. The type of link neighborhood we are getting and how Google sees our link neighborhood.

What are external links?
External links to your site are the links that reside on pages that do not belong to your domain. For example, if you are viewing links for http://www.google.com/, all the links that do not originate from pages on any subdomain of google.com would appear as external links to your site.

What are internal links?

Internal links to your site are the links that reside on pages that belong to your domain. For example, if you are viewing links for http://www.google.com/, all the links that originate from pages on any subdomain of google.com, such as http://www.google.com/ or mobile.google.com, would appear as internal links to your site.

Viewing links to a page on your site

You can view the links to your site by selecting a verified site in your webmaster tools account and clicking on the new Links tab at the top. Once there, you will see the two options on the left: external links and internal links, with the external links view selected. You will also see a table that lists pages on your site, as shown below. The first column of the table lists pages of your site with links to them, and the second column shows the number of the external links to that page that we have available to show you. (Note that this may not be 100% of the external links to this page.)