For as long as I’ve been involved in SEO, the major search engines have opted for varying degrees of disclosure when it came to displaying the number of incoming links to a particular domain. By typing in link:yourwebsite.com in the search field you were able to display this value.

The value to an SEO to view accurate reflections of inbound links (IBL) has a few uses. For one, you can tell who links to you and whether or not you need to alter promotion/linking strategies. For the longest time Yahoo typically revealed the most comprehensive list of IBL, whereas Google did not. Google was the most ambiguous when it came to displaying inbound link values, that was until today.

All Google Webmaster Tools holders can now view IBL values, apparently real IBL values, known to Google. Of course, we don’t know for absolute certainty whether or not this is truly the COMPLETE revelation of your IBL number, but it is definitely a step above what was available before. Webmasters have complained long enough and Google delivered, which was nice of them. (Official post here: Google Blogspot)

So what is the verdict thus far? Well looking at the tools it’s either semi-useful, or completely comprehensive. The links feature enables you to know how many links EACH page has pointing to it. Of course, this list of links includes various syndication pages and social bookmarking feeds, but nonetheless, it’s comprehensive in that manner. Of course, the value of these links is not measured or displayed so you can’t tell if it’s doing you any real good.

Of course, one of the reasons link: commands never displayed full results was to protect webmasters from competition. This is still the case since you can only view the results within the Webmasters console. Nonetheless, all in all, this is another solid tool provided by Google. Nobody has offered this type of information in an easy format (namely the number of links to each specific page.) Kudos Google.