InsureMe Affiliate Blog: Using Google Webmaster Tools to Find Hidden Link Juice

If SEO is an art form, then link sculpting is one of the major tools that an SEO artist has at their disposal. I’ve spoken before about using the rel=”nofollow” link attribute to maximize the flow of link juice to your most important pages, and reduce the flow to the least.

But what many people don’t know is that they may have some link equity somewhere on their site that they don’t know about. Maybe someone linked to an article on your site randomly and you never noticed the link. Maybe someone picked up on a blog post of yours and pointed a link to that page. Heck, maybe a page on your site got included in an academic directory and you never noticed. Seriously, I’ve seen it happen.

Knowing where all your inbound links are pointing is essential to being a proactive link sculptor, and luckily Google provides a tool in their Google Webmaster Tools interface that can help you see where all of your inbound links are pointing.

To see this report you need to do the following:

Make sure your site is verified on Google Webmaster Tools (see instructions on how to do that here.)
Once you have your site verified, login to Google Webmaster Tools through your Google account
Once logged in, click on the URL of the site you want to explore
Click on the “Links” button on the left side navigation
Click “Pages with external links”
Looking through the pages you have listed with “External Links”
Click on the number under “External Links” to see where the links are coming from

If you find a page with quality links you didn’t know about, go to the page on your site and see what you can do to better sculpt the link juice on that page. Would it be best to “nofollow” some links to get your juice more concentrated to your main pages? Could you add a link to the page that points to another page on your site you think should rank better?

You get the idea.

So if you’re not using it already, start checking out the “Pages with external links” report on Google Webmaster Tools…you might just find some juice you never knew you had.

Disclaimer: Some people think registering with Google Webmaster Tools can negatively effect your Google rankings…I think that’s bull-honkey, but just wanted to warn ya!