seo

Big News & Little News

Yesterday brought us the biggest news the SEO world has had in sometime – Google’s Webmaster Central is showing relatively accurate and complete link data. When stacked against Yahoo!’s Site Explorer, this stuff looks pretty amazing. Webmasters are going to find themselves with a lot more link analysis time on their hands, and the value of having access to multiple account at Webmaster Central is going to be considerably higher. My favorite coverage on this comes from Search Engine Land – Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools, but I also liked Eric Ward’s ideas on what could make this data even better.

Just a few screenshots of SEOmoz data before I move on to other topics:

Google Webmaster Central Screenshot

Above is our inlinks list – almost 300,000. Yahoo! reports 458,349, and Google excludes results in supplemental, so we’re seeing very similiar data from the two. The next example is a bit better for differentiating the two.

Links to Blogdetail 1625 via Google

Above, Google’s showing us all the links they know about to the blog post I wrote about my dad’s emergency room visit a few weeks back. They’ve got 87 total listed to Yahoo!’s 76 (many of which are different than Google’s). So, despite Google’s “less-than-complete” link data, they’re still supplying more than Yahoo! does sometimes and certainly showing some unique data. MSN shows 6 links (some of which neither Google nor Yahoo! listed).

Personally, I think I like Google’s data the best at this point. In terms of raw numbers of links, it’s the most compelling, as they have some limit on the quality or value of pages they’ll display links from. While it’s hard to get a competitive analysis from them, you can do a lot with those link numbers and I suspect we’ll see a lot of analysis of dates and value as people start downloading and number-crunching the “up-to-1-million” links Google shows.

On to the other topics of the last week:

And I’ll end with the question I end every roundup with – What did I miss?

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