SEO Tip 4: Google Sitemaps - Links Tool
You should all know and use google sitemap by now 
If you do not, register and take a look. The deal with sitemaps is, that you submit a file, that is actually a list of all the pages on your website to Google. Google uses this as a map to crawl and index your site better. I doesn’t mean all your pages will be indexed, or that they will be indexed quicker, but there is sure a benefit of having a sitemap.
Click here, to create your own sitemap account.
But what you might not know is that when you register and enter the sitemap account you have all sorts of tool available. Tools like:
- last time google bot crawled you site
- crawl rate
- pagerank of your pages (just a bar)
- when your sitemap was last downloaded
- for which keywords you have a good rank in google and which keywords bring people to your site
- and at last - number of backlinks.
Google Backlinks
Until now, you could only see the most frequent anchor text in external links that point to your site and in internal links. But now Google changed this tool completely. Now you get a list of all your backlinks by pages. That means thatI canget the number of backlinks for my whole site and for individual page like
http://seotips.buzz-directory.com/2007/02/06/ how-to-submit-your-site-to-a-directory/
for instance. If I click on the page, I get a list of all the backlinks that point to this page. That menas no more wondering how many links google has counted that point to your site, how many votes does your site have by Google accounts. It’s all clear
Google did caution that the count of external links may not be 100 percent of the links Google knows about in its index. Google also cautioned webmasters (well acctually Matt Cutts did on his blog):
Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. I’m going to say that again: Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. Sometime in the next year, someone will say “But I saw an insert-link-fad-here backlink show up in Google’s backlink tool, so it must count. Right?” And then I’ll point them back here, where I say do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.
Still, now you are able to get a grip on you backlinks and plan you strategy. Great stuff!
