Backlink checker tools are beaten by Google Sitemaps
Backlink checker tools’ benefits are indisputable, however various tools use various search engines in order to mine the data. Moreover, there are usually more methods how to get data from each search engine. This fact might lead to various results even though every used tool uses the same search engine’s data. For example, our backlink checker tool (see the menu panel) retrieves data from Yahoo, since Yahoo shows all links to public visitors. But this doesn’t mean that Google or MSN found the same links pointing to some site. Basically, every search engine should contain same data like others do, but this is just a theory. The difference is caused by different ways of crawling the web. For example, MSN didn’t follow dynamic links located at dynamic URLs (I’m not sure MSN does it now). This results in various amounts of links, pages, images and so on. During the last months, Yahoo improved their crawlers and databases speed what was very beneficial for backlink checker tools which work with Yahoo’s data. Using various methods, you can get different results within even 1 search engine. Why? If you type „link:some_domain.com“ into Google’s search box, you should see how many linkpages this URL has. But, what if you use a script for this action? Then you need to encode the URL properly. And this is what lacks in many applications exactly; Some scripts don’t use dynamic links encoding, some of them work with top-level domains only, and much more. There is no „super“ backlink checker tool which works 100%-ly. On the other hand, there is no need for such tool. It is important to know how to do SEO, only then you can get what hard work deserves. Generally speaking, if you focus on Google, you should get good rankings on Yahoo and MSN too. It’s very unfortunate to hire a person focusing on Google who can’t manage top positions on other search engines. This usually leads to dissatisfaction.
Understanding customers’ requirements, Google launched new tool within their Google Sitemaps program. Unlike Yahoo or MSN, Google doesn’t show all linkpages in SERP. You simply can have 1000 incoming links to your web site, but Google will show only 40-50 of them to public. Why? It’s how they fight against unethical SEOs and it’s how they make things difficult. If Google showed all links pointing to any site in SERP, it would be very easy to undertake SEO campaign leading to obtain similar links (or the same ones). In general, it would be very easy to win the war againg your competitors.
New Google’s tool shows all external links pointing to your homepage. What’s more, it shows all external links pointing to internal pages within your web site. This is very useful, because you can determine which content people like. Another advantage of this new Google Sitemaps’ tool is that is also shows the last date when accessed a page with an external link to some of your pages. You can monitor incoming links without any heavy effort.
Of course, external links aren’t nothing if you don’t kepp internal pages on your site linked together. For this purpose, Google Sitemaps offers you to check all links to internal pages too. It’s similar to external link tool, however it gives you a nice report of how your internal pages are linked. Linking internal pages is very important, because you can tell Google which page has the most weight. Regarding internal links, you can easily understand if Google sees your site properly. For example, if there are broken links or unreadable characters in URLs, you can detect the problem in a simple way.
The only disadvantage is that every process takes some time, so it is not possible to see the real-time data at any backlink checker tool. But this common disadvantage can’t efface the benefits of this great tool! Moreover, no-one else can see your links unless you publish them.
When published (02/06/2007; mm/dd/yyyy), this site had 1162 external incoming links, 4381 internal links. Started in May/2006, these numbers are very optimistic and satisfactory.