Matt tells us all about the new Google backlinks feature in the webmaster console.

I had a little look at this and must confess, think its pretty cool in an ‘ooh this is interesting kind of way’.

The numbers aside, what I really liked was how it enables you to drill down to individual pages and see the number of external links pointing to each URI.

If you have a good site with lots of different types of content a thing like this is a handy feature. If there are a high number of links to a certain page, then it could mean that this page is adding lots of value to lots of different people, which could be interpreted as a do-more-of-this type-of-thing signal. Sure, you could find out similar stuff from logfile analysis too, but it might take a little longer to identify such specifics.

I’m not going to say too much on this as much of it has already been said. What I’d like to see in addition would be a few extras like.The ability to identify what types of links these were; eg were they nofollow, what is the makeup of the anchor text, what were the dates these links were 1st encountered/registered, what is the pagerank of these external in links, how do my pages rank for their target terms. Sure, again, I could go out and look at these things myself, Google could make it all a bit easier though. Maybe someone could make a little app that enabled people to plugin their csv datasets and obtain such a report.

Anyone for a spot of cURLing?  ;)