Get a more complete picture about how other sites link to you

Friday, March 16, 2007

For quite a while, you’ve been able to see a list of the most common words used in anchor text to
your site. This information is useful, because it helps you know what others think your site is
about. How sites link to you has an impact on your traffic from those links, because it describes
your site to potential visitors. In addition, anchor text influences the queries your site ranks
for in the search results.

Now we’ve enhanced the information we provide and will show you the complete phrases sites use to
link to you, not just individual words. And we’ve expanded the number we show to 100. To make
this information as useful as possible, we’re aggregating the phrases by eliminating
capitalization and punctuation. For instance, if several sites have linked to your site using the
following anchor text:

We would aggregate that anchor text and show it as one phrase, as follows:

You can find this list of phrases by logging into
Webmaster Tools,
accessing your site, then going to
Statistics > Page analysis. You can view this data in a
table and can download it as a CSV file.

And as we told you last month, you can see the
individual links to pages of your site
by going to Links > External links. We hope these details
give you additional insight into your site traffic.