Good News From Google Webmaster Central

You can now see the anchor text of the inbound links to your site. To see them you need a Webmaster Central account for your site, then log in and select Statistics then Page Analysis. Google isn’t showing you the anchor text of specific links, nor are they restricting this anchor text report just to external links pointing at your site. You’re getting a sample distribution of the most common keywords used in links pointing at your site from other people’s pages and from pages within your own site. This means the tool is most useful for getting a general big picture idea of what Google thinks your site is about based on the links they see pointing to you.

Nevertheless, it’s not a useful way to see how specific pages are linking to you. For that, you’d need a more innovative tool like OptiLink. The Google Link tool does show links that have the nofollow tag placed on them. The tool also counts multiple links from the same site know as run of site links, more than once and displays a lot of worthless spam links in the reports, so it’s not perfect. It’s important to remember that just because a link shows up in Google’s tool it does not mean that Google gives credit to that link in terms of passing PageRank or link popularity. The only way to know the real value of a link is to learn how to evaluate link quality yourself. No matter, this addition is a good start and hopefully Google will continue to add features to the Google Webmaster Central. It would really be nice to see exactly which pages linking to us contain the anchor text Google provides but we will need to wait on that.