If you’ve logged into Google’s Webmaster Tools over the last couple days you may have noticed some changes with the backlinks being displayed. Google has long displayed a list of the different pages which backlink to your site in alphabetical order. While this may have been the simplest way to display the information, it was far from the best. A recent update to the Webmaster Tools now gives users a more diverse listing of the pages linking back to them.
This is especially beneficial for site owners who have a large number of backlinks. Webmaster Tools only exports up to about 100,000 backlinks total, and will display significantly fewer than that while browsing their page. This meant that sites with hundreds of thousands of backlinks would only be able to see a sampling of the total links, and only in alphabetical order. This, of course, could cut off some potentially valuable information.
With the update, however, Google will now give a much more accurate view of where the backlinks are coming from. Rather than displaying them in alphabetical order, they are displaying them in what Google is calling, “lexicographical order” which Google says means more, “uniformly from the full spectrum of backlinks rather than alphabetically.”
While the maximum number of links which will be displayed is still around 100,000, the links will be from a much more diverse set of domains. For example, if your site is getting 50,000 backlinks from pages listed on ABC.com, it won’t display them all. Instead, it will include some links from that domain, and add in others from other domains.
This will give webmasters a much more complete list of sites which are linking to them, which will be much more valuable. It also helps site owners to have a more accurate set of information concerning how their site is being ranked by Google.
Google says this will also allow site owners to more easily clean up any bad linking practices, which is extremely important in this post-panda & penguin age.
You can see the full announcement from Google HERE.
