Yesterday afternoon Google announced the release of a new link reporting tool (here and here). It’s long been known in the SEO community that doing a simple link search (i.e. link:www.your-domain-name.com) only displays a small sampling of the sites that link to you. Now webmasters will be able to get a better picture of who all is linking. Google still isn’t going to display all the links, but it will display many, many more than the link search does. For example, here’s an excerpt from Danny Sullivan’s article on this:
That’s showing about 3,000 links to the Search Engine Land web site (note, for some people, you might see no results, due to an apparent glitch). In contrast, the new system within Google Webmaster Central reports to me that I have 57,000 links pointing my way. From 3,000 to 57,000 links — what a different the new system makes!
So, as you can see, this could be a huge help for those who are trying to build their rank via linking campaigns. It’s an exciting change to see Google (or any search engine) build tools to help webmasters work toward better rankings in the SERPs.