How SEOs Use Link Knowledge In Google Search Console

How do you use the link data within Google Search Console? That is what John Mueller of Google asked earlier this month, and he got a nice list of uses for the link data within the Search Console.

Personally, I rarely use it but when I was reviewing Search Console, I noticed my link count spiked and it ended up being specific to specific post (a recap post). So I assume someone was trying to mess with me here (comment below if it was you):

Here is the post where John asked this:

On that note, I’m curious how you use the link data in Search Console? No nefarious background, I was just going through a set of sites recently, and wondered what I should tell folks to look out for there. You all probably have more experience there!

— John (@JohnMu) February 2, 2024

Laurent Bourrelly responded listing out these use cases:

• Old and new sites
• Type of websites
• Link placement in source code
• No or very little keyword optimized Anchor Text
• small and big (Majestic Citation Flow)
• IPs
• Chronology and acquisition velocity
• Topics (similar and related)
• Majestic TTF must match topic
• Nofollow and dofollow
• Majority from home country plus US and various
• Majority from home language plus English and various

Andy Beard wrote:

• Trackbacks
• Technorati/Blogcatalog
• Google Alerts (please don’t kill that too)
• People commenting with a link
• Free Majestic

Now that is old school!

Tony McCreath wrote, “It can help find out why Google is crawling some strange URLs.”

Terry Van Horne added, “I only look at it when cleaning up a mess some other SEO made. For me the GSC links are the links that matter. I realize it’s a “snapshot” so I merge that with Majestic. I review closely any I believe are spammy in the GSC cuz they are most useful for future proofing.”

Dean said, “Internal link data is more helpful to me and mine. Being able to understand which page types (subfolders) are getting the most attention, or not.”

Rutledge Daugette wrote, “If we’re not supposed to spend time disavowing, it’s not the most helpful tool sometimes. So many spam/scraper sites.” He shared this screenshot:

Did anyone miss anything?

Forum discussion at X.