Thursday, March 15, 2007 at 7:49 PM
For quite a while, you've been able to see a list of the most common words used in anchor text to your site. This information is useful, because it helps you know what others think your site is about. How sites link to you has an impact on your traffic from those links, because it describes your site to potential visitors. In addition, anchor text influences the queries your site ranks for in the search results.Now we've enhanced the information we provide and will show you the complete phrases sites use to link to you, not just individual words. And we've expanded the number we show to 100. To make this information as useful as possible, we're aggregating the phrases by eliminating capitalization and punctuation. For instance, if several sites have linked to your site using the following anchor text:
Site 1 "Buffy, blonde girl, pointy stick"
Site 2 "Buffy blonde girl pointy stick"
Site 3 "buffy: Blonde girl; Pointy stick."
We would aggregate that anchor text and show it as one phrase, as follows:
"buffy blonde girl pointy stick"
You can find this list of phrases by logging into webmaster tools, accessing your site, then going to Statistics > Page anaysis. You can view this data in a table and can download it as a CSV file.
And as we told you last month, you can see the individual links to pages of your site by going to Links > External links. We hope these details give you additional insight into your site traffic.
28 comments:
My blogs
impunv.blogspot.com
and
sssbbg.googlepages.com
have been in existence for a long time and have been pinged often. Yet they never show up in searches. Why? What is wrong with them?
Yes! Thank you! This is a feature i wanted for a very long time :) Thanks again.
besides I'd like to see the number of each anchor text links
Does the neighbouring text near the anchor content have any influence on the follow link as well?
How are the 100 items ranked?
Why not just add a column in the external link report that shows the anchor text for each link that you are already reporting?
Hi Philipp, The anchor text is ordered by the most common phrases. So, the phrase used most often in link text is first on the list.
Thanks everyone for the feedback. We'll look to see how we can expand this feature in the future.
GOOGLE has hijacked my home page and will not let go
What can I do to stop this extremely irritating and time consuming annoyance.
Normally Yahoo is my home page – every day I change my page back to Yahoo and within seconds Google has changed it back.
Further when I do a google search i am rerouted every other time
Both problems started at the same time…
I am getting to hate google –
Please advise
Robert
I don't understand what I am missing.
If I look at the Statistics > page analysis page on my google webtools site it tells me the distribution of the type of pages (text/html and application/pdf) and encodings (US-ASCII, UTF-8, CP1252 (Windows Latin-1)) of my web pages.
I see no list of anchor text words or phrases used to link to my site.
The external links page does list 46 links to my site, so there should be information to populate the list you mention in this post.
Dave
I experience the same thing as lupo. Is it rolled out at once or not? Is it available in Russia (I use english interface but the site and the links are in Russia)
Aggregating the anchor text makes the information very useless, not useful.
It would be EXTREMELY helpful to know what anchor text is being passed. So why not filter out the links that don't pass value and show the anchor text next to the links that do pass value?
Whenever I see a csv on any google service I automatically think, "where the tight integration with google docs like gmail?"
Although csv would require a constant exporting of the file, unless someday there is some xml/csv/tsv/xls interoperability.
i don't think this new feature adds value, i actually think that most common words in external links was much more useful as it gave you an idea of a theme of all links. I don't think that comparing 3 or 5 word long phrases is the best idea...what about their order? If you have an anchor text "credit cards" and "cards credit" it would appear as two separate rows but their value from linking perspective is the same. I also agree with Mark barrera, that reporting text next to the url would be much more useful.
Great SEO Blog guys!
SEO Expert Michael Wilson
Why I see 0 for both internal and external links all the time? Please take a look at this http://farm1.static.flickr.com/163/427868666_9a0fbd7aa5_o.jpg
I have this same problem - no information about anchor text on Statistics - Page Analysis at all... Is the feature available to all users?
If I look at the Statistics > page analysis page on my google webtools site it tells me the distribution of the type of pages (text/html and application/pdf) and encodings (US-ASCII, UTF-8, CP1252 (Windows Latin-1)) of my web pages.
I see no list of anchor text words or phrases used to link to my site.
I have three sites: two older sites withe a sitemap, and one new site, which I put up recently.
The new site shows the phrases and words that links to the site use.
But the two older sites don't show this, in Page analysis.
Both sites have lots of links to them, as can be seen in the statistics part, but the page analysis page only shows encoding and type...
http://www.sylviastuurman.nl
http://www.luiemotorfiets.nl
(the two older sites)
http://www.lazymotorbike.eu
(the new site)
for my blog http://info4beingrich.blogspot.com when i check in the webmastertools it shows 701 external links, but when i check it through links:info4beingrich.blogspot.com it shows no links found.. why is this so.. how can this be rectified..
Love the external and internal links information.
Any chance of keeping a history - so we can look at progress over time?
When viewing the external links for a given page, the "next" link at the bottom right has stopped working. Rather than taking me to the next page of links, it takes me back to the summary that lists my URLs and the number of external links pointing to each.
The same is true of "Items per page" menu. When I switch it from 30 to 100 it takes me back to the summary page. Essentially, I can no longer see past the first 30 links pointing to a page.
I really think that the tags really make a big difference in you google page ranking and that less attention is paid to the page title.
If I go to Webmaster Tools/Links/Pages with external links, my home page http://www.OceansArt.us has 189 External Links. There are many missing from this list.
When I go to Statistics/Index stats/link: Pages that link to your site's front page, there are only 15, only one of which is external. In mid November my Google Search visitors dropped by a factor of 20 (5%). For many search terms involving my business "free photos", I was number one, now I am often not in the top 500, even when I have the exact search string being sought.
How can I get back? Is it related to the error in link:www.oceansart.us ? Is Google broken or am I? Thanks!
Hi John,
Both the link: operator and the backlinks report in Webmaster Tools are designed to show a sample of your links, not all of them. Webmaster Tools provides a more complete list than the link: operator, but it's still not meant to be 100% of all your incoming links. So you needn't worry about there being an error; this is by design.
Your drop in search traffic is thus most likely not related to the number of links shown (unless you've also had a significant change in the number or quality of your incoming links recently). If you want to discuss your search performance in more detail, the best place for that would be in our Webmaster Help Group.
Hi there,
Last year I appear to have been able to retrieve anchor text in external links information from Google Webmaster Tools including examples.
Your post seems to indicate this information should be available under Statistics > Page Analysis but when I log in and navigate to Statistics page there is no link to "Page Analysis".
Apologies if I'm late to the party or just not opening my eyes, but how do I see anchor text information for my site?
Thanks,
Dave.
Hi Dave--
We've changed our UI a bit since this post was posted. Right now you can find these data under Statistics > What Googlebot sees.
I am not sure if I am in the right place... A question: my site www.elrodeo.es is written in Spanish and only for Spanish. The website appears number 2 in google.com but 11 in google.es and we sell only to Spanish public so I want it to be oposite. Does it have anything to do with encodings? In Google Webmaster Tools my site encodings is mostly US-ASCII. Is it normal, or I need to change something in the website that encodings distribution appears CP1252 (Windows Latin-1) or UTF-8?
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Group.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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