I really try to avoid posts about new Google products or features. But today they put one out that is actually related to search and it’s terrific. It’s an upgrade to Google Webmaster Tools that provides clear and useful information about who links to the pages in your website.

Until now the tool available for finding the inbound links to your site were very poor (like all other SEO tools). And while Google is clear that this new information isn’t complete, it is significantly better than what we’ve had before in terms of both quantity (there are way more links listed than before) and accuracy (we’re now shown how many links point to each page and can easily see and download the linking URLs).

This is important because inbound links play a critical role in how pages from your website rank in Google and the other search engines. (Skip this part if you already know how it works.) The search engines essentially measure relevance and reputation – and the only clues they have are what you say about yourself (the content on your web pages) and what others say about you (the links into your site and who/where they’re from). As such, optimization is the process of managing website content (which words go where on what pages) and cultivating relevant links.

So half (or more) of our organic search engine fate is in the hands of inbound links, and for the first 10 years or so of the internet age we’ve had to do without very good visibility into these links. Technically speaking, it’s been like getting ready for a date without a mirror. We’ve had only a vague idea of where we stood going in and just enough information to be confused afterwards.

One tab over in Google Webmaster Tools, under Statistics and Page Query, Google shows a seemingly random sampling of the link text they found pointing to our site. This another piece of the puzzle, so while they're feeding us peasants why doesn't Google link these two pieces of data so we can see the link text for each inbound link?

If they don’t, let’s hope someone puts up a simple tool where you can upload the .cvs file of your links (which you can now download) and then see a nice anchor text analysis. I bit someone is probably coding it as I type this request. If you're the one doing this, please also grab the PageRank of the linking page, and let me upload a list of target keywords so you can tell me how many of them are found on the linking page too. Thanks.

In any case, thanks to the good folks at Google for this tool. Here's hoping it's the first of many Webmaster Tool enhancements we see this year.

For more details and helpful analysis of the new features, visit SearchEngineLand)