SEO Tip #112: Can I Tell Google About Links to My Site?
Matt Cutts: Unfortunately that’s not quite how it works. What we do is we crawl the web and as we discover new links form pages that we already know about we’ll follow those links.
You can submit a URL to Google so we have, Google.com/addurl.html where you can submit an individual page to Google but in general what works best is if we find the links ourselves as we are crawling the web.
It’s not all that helpful if the links that you are presenting to Google that you have found are pointing to your site are so low in terms of PageRank, or so hard to discover on the web that you have to tell us where they are. It almost kind of defeats the purpose a little bit because what we tend to find is the links that we find on our own as we are crawling the web tend to be of higher quality.
So right now we don’t really have a massive way to say, “Here are all the sites that link to my site.” Now remember that you can upload a site map, which is a list of all the URLs on your site but even then we don’t guarantee that uploading a site map will get all of your pages indexed. It’s just a way that you can tell Google that these are the pages on my site.
Hope that helps.
About the Author
Andy Johnson has been on the Internet since the its dawn(ie his first computer program was recorded on cassette tape) and his first hard drive cost about as much his current MacBook. His first byline was in 1993 for a local newspaper rag he eventually helmed, and his last “real job” was at a computer start up which ended when it ended. Throughout it all he’s freelanced and blogged. Now he is mesmerized by Search Engine Optimization forever trying to “rise to the top” for the right reasons. He’s been married to his wife Julia for as long as he can remember and has two lovely, wonderful children. He looks forward to sharing the latest in the technical best for all the online entrepreneurs.