With the new aquatic animal addition to the Google zoo on the past few months, links received a whole new meaning for site owners since they can no longer only just improve a website’s search rankings, but also to horrifically vaporize them (I hope you got the scary tone).
For some webmasters this little animal, which most people perceived as innocent and cute, became the most terrifying horror figure that chasing them in their dreams (again, scary…) and to avoid meeting the dark Penguin angel, they must keep a close eye on their incoming links.
But how can you do that? How can you discover in real-time (or close to that) what are the links Google harvests? Oh, hello Mr. Cutts, didn’t see you there… What’s that…? Really? To download our most recent links? Sorted by date? That’s awesome! Now if you can please just wear your pants…
You can now download links from Google *sorted by date*. Nice. Look for “Download latest links” in console UI. Pass it on!
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) July 17, 2012
Yep, that’s true, senior I-have-bigger-than-yours has announced that it is now possible to download the most recent incoming links! Google’s John Mueller (plus pants) added some more context to this astonishing revelation in a Google+ post, stating it is already available on the nearest Google Webmaster Tools account to your home.
All you have to do if you want to find out what are the most recent links pointing at your site that the workaholic Googlebot encountered while roaming the web, is to visit your Webmaster Tools account, enter “Who links the most” from the “Links to Your Site” section and click on the “Download latest links” button.
You can choose to download the document in a CSV file or directly to Google Docs where you could see the links in your browser. The links are sorted by reverse chronological order (latest first) and aren’t limited to a specific date or specific number of links (whoohoo).
Okay, so we have a merciless search algorithm that butchers websites with many dubious links and we have the list of links Google collects. Now we only wait for the last piece of this Penguin puzzle, the highly anticipated disavow links tool Matt Cutts promised to launch.