Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Google Links Tool Shows Other Sites’ Links, Too
The new backlinks checker of the Google Webmaster Tools has a bug that lets you see all the backlinks of unverified sites, too. This allowed me to check all backlinks for Google.com, for example, and download the links table as CSV file. Even though I don’t see a security issue with this (the links are public to begin with), and even though the details of this bug have been posted on other sites, I’ll omit the specifics for now and rather alerted Google so they can fix this. But here are a couple of backlink counts I retrieved:
- Google.com: 1,432,908 backlinks
(in comparison, the “link:” operator shows a backlink count of 1,750,000) - Yahoo.com: 1,431,186 backlinks
(in comparison, the “link:” operator shows a backlink count of 1,990,000 ) - MSN.com: 839,927 backlinks
- TechCrunch.com: 268,732 backlinks
- Digg.com: 492,480 backlinks
- BoingBoing.net: 920,345 backlinks
- SearchEngineLand.com: 25,841 backlinks
- Waxy.org/links: 79,428 backlinks
- MicroPersuasion.com: 195,541 backlinks
[Thanks Michel!]
Update: Google fixed this now, though the Links tab is gone... I suppose it’ll be back later on. The details of this bug had been posted at the Spanish Google blogs/ forums Telendro.com.es and Dirson.com. Basically, you were able to view another domain’s backlinks by clicking on one of your domain’s pages, and then replacing the second URL parameter. Example:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ externallinks?siteUrl= http%3A%2F%2Fblog.outer-court.com%2F&hl=en& bplink=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.outer-court.com
... could be replaced with ...
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ externallinks?siteUrl= http%3A%2F%2Fblog.outer-court.com%2F&hl=en& bplink=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com
[Thanks again Michel!]
Update 2: And the Links tab is back. [Thanks Vanessa!]
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