There are quite a few tools out there for finding out how many backlinks you have and where they come from, but it is better to hear it from the horses mouth – we want to know what how many links Google thinks are pointing at our site.

Well, Google’s Webmaster Tools allow you see that. Once you have verified that you own a site (by uploading an html file to your server or including a special meta tag in your index page) you can view how many links to your site Google has indexed. (You also need a Google account)

The results are very interesting and a lot more useful than the inaccurate Link: operator available in Google search.

As well as showing the total number of external links to your site, the tool breaks them down to show which pages within your site they are pointing at, where they are coming from and the date they were last found. (Using this I’ve found a few directories that provide multiple links from one submission because of search results pages that are indexed).

You can also view a similar display for the internal link structure of your site. The number of internal links to a page helps Google rate the relative importance of pages within a site. Seeing it displayed this way helps to highlight problems in your internal link structure.

All this data can be downloaded. You could combine it with other data such as the pagerank of your site’s pages and the pages linking to them for a more thorough analysis.

You can also upload and check sitemaps, check your robots.txt file, view search queries for your site and other stuff I haven’t fully understood yet.

This tool is a must for anyone wanting to understand how Google crawls and interprets your site.

Find out more about it at: http://searchengineland.com/070205-165836.php

Until the end of February advertisers can get 50% off at reviewme.com using the coupon code ‘trial’.

Aaron Wall just posted this announcement on SEOBook.com.

SEOMoz.org have a useful tool that gives a measure of the relative importance and visibility in search engines (similar to PageRank). It’s call Page Strength.

It uses the number of inbound links, Alexa rank, PageRank, number of links from other important sites like Technorati and Del.icio.us, and other factors to score pages.

This is a useful measure when a site is new and doesn’t have Pagerank (e.g. the Page Strength for this site is 1.5 while toolbar PageRank for this site is currently 0), or if toolbar PageRank hasn’t been updated for a while.

I made my own SEOMoz Page Strength bookmarklet for finding the Page Strength of the current page, and there is also one on the SEOMoz site.