Google provides a fantastic suite of tools for free use.
Among these, Google Search Console stands out as an essential resource for every webmaster, particularly for SEO and link building strategies.
Serving as a companion to Google Analytics, Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) offers invaluable insights into how Google’s bots perceive your website. It uncovers errors and HTML issues that might otherwise go unnoticed.
This collection of free tools is beneficial for anyone involved in SEO, whether managing a single website or multiple. As advocates for backlink analysis, a crucial question arises: How effective is Google Search Console for backlink monitoring and analysis?
Let’s delve into understanding how Google Search Console functions for backlink analysis.
Getting Started with Google Search Console
Signing up for Google Search Console is a straightforward process, comparable to setting up a Gmail account.
- Navigate to Google Search Console.
- Sign in using your Google account credentials. You can utilize the same login details you use for Google Analytics.
- Once logged in, click on the “Add property” button, typically located at the top left of the page.
- Select the property type. You can choose between a Domain property (which covers all protocols and subdomains) or a URL prefix property (which is specific to a single protocol and URL prefix). For most users, the URL prefix option is simpler to set up initially. Enter your website URL and click “Continue.”
- Next, you’ll be prompted to verify website ownership. For the URL prefix property, Google offers several verification methods, including uploading an HTML file to your site, adding a meta tag to your site’s homepage, or using your domain name provider login. Choose the method that’s most convenient for you and follow the instructions.
After successful verification, it’s highly recommended to submit a sitemap. One of the key advantages of using Search Console is its ability to crawl your site and index relevant pages efficiently. Submitting a sitemap helps Google discover and understand your website’s structure more effectively.
Key Features of Google Search Console
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Crawl Reports: Experiencing indexing problems? This section helps you identify and resolve crawl errors, ensuring Google can access and index your site’s content.
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Performance Reports (Keywords): Google Search Console is the primary source for understanding which search queries are driving traffic to your website. The Performance reports show you the keywords people are using to find you in Google Search results, along with metrics like impressions, clicks, average position, and click-through rate (CTR).
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Sitemaps: Directly inform Google about the pages on your website by submitting your sitemap. This aids in faster and more comprehensive indexing of your site’s content.
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Links Reports (Incoming Links): Examine data on your website’s backlinks and download backlink data. Note that the web-based interface provides a preview, and more extensive data can be downloaded.
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Security Issues and Manual Actions: If your site incurs a penalty from Google, or if there are security issues detected, you will be notified in this section.
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Coverage Reports (Error Detection): Google Search Console detects various errors, including crawl errors, 404 errors, and other issues that might affect your site’s performance in search results. It also highlights HTML errors and other backend problems.
Google Search Console for Backlinks: Capabilities and Limitations
Considering the features listed, Google Search Console’s backlink functionality is present, but its effectiveness needs closer examination.
It may appear that Google provides a basic feature set, leaving room for more in-depth analysis.
Google Search Console offers valuable information. You can analyze click-through rates, identify keywords driving traffic, and utilize crawl features. Furthermore, it highlights broken links on your site—links within your website that are no longer functional.
While providing numerous metrics and being free of charge, which is undoubtedly advantageous, Google Search Console’s perspective is internal. It reflects the internal workings of your website as seen by Google, rather than offering a comprehensive view of your site’s relationship with the broader internet landscape.
Based on practical experience, Google Search Console excels at identifying and rectifying on-site SEO errors and website functionality issues. The emphasis is on your website, lacking in competitive analysis capabilities.
Now, focusing specifically on backlinks, how effective is Google Search Console?
Unfortunately, the backlink feature within Google Search Console primarily serves users seeking a basic overview of their own website’s backlink profile. It isn’t designed to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of all your backlinks, let alone enable competitive backlink analysis or the development of robust link-building strategies.
How to Check Backlinks Using Google Search Console
Backlinks, often referred to as inbound links, are a significant ranking factor in SEO, making it essential for Google to provide some backlink insights within Search Console.
Google Search Console does display links from external websites and blogs pointing to your site. However, within the interface, you only see a sample of your total backlink profile.
While Google tracks extensive data related to both incoming and outgoing links for websites, this data is kept closely guarded. Nevertheless, Google does provide some backlink data through the Search Console dashboard.
To access this data, navigate to the “Links” section on the left-hand sidebar. Then, you can explore “Top linked pages” to see which pages on your site are receiving the most backlinks, or “Top linking sites” to see which websites are linking to you the most.
Upon selecting “Top linking sites,” the page displays a sample of the sites linking to you most frequently and how your data is interconnected.
You have the option to download your link data in Google Sheets, Excel, or CSV format. The data is presented in a sheet sorted by date. To maximize the utility of this data, you may need to create pivot tables to sort and analyze it according to your specific needs.
It’s important to note that there may be data quotas, meaning you might not be able to download the complete list of backlinks, especially for larger websites.
While you gain valuable information about who is linking to you, the data provided is relatively basic. You primarily see the quantity of links, the linking sources, and anchor text (though anchor text details are found in a separate area within Google Search Console). Deeper metrics like link quality, follow/nofollow status at scale, or competitive backlink profiles are not readily available within Google Search Console.
Is Google Search Console Sufficient for Backlink Analysis?
In short, the answer is: Not entirely. Google Search Console’s backlink feature is somewhat limited, particularly when compared to dedicated backlink analysis tools like Monitor Backlinks and others in the market.
However, Google Search Console remains a crucial component in the SEO toolkit, helping you improve your search rankings by pinpointing issues within your website.
The backlinks section of Google Search Console is not the primary reason users leverage this tool. As evidenced by quick Google searches, most SEO professionals do not rely on it as their primary source for backlink data.
Google Search Console is best utilized for identifying and resolving website issues. Features like sitemap submission streamline the process for Google to crawl and index your content effectively, and the error reports help maintain website health. For comprehensive backlink analysis and strategic link building, dedicated backlink tools offer more robust features and deeper insights.
