Google News, Inside.

Here is just one aspect of Google Webmaster Tools that I feel needs some more love.

Pages with external links is a great tool to have, simply because it provides an easy-access breakdown of all the links going to individual pages. But, a huge big but, the data is provides is not displayed in a way that actually makes it useful.

Having access to data is one thing, but leaving it in a format that is not readable or easy to interpret renders data to be fairly useless.

Let’s take a look at what I’m talking about.

If you click the image, you’ll get a larger perspective of what I’m about to dive into.

Great that Google provides me access to the data that they are seeing, but how useful is it?

I see mixx.com this, mixx.com that, but there are a few reasons I’m disappointed with this tool (and how the data is displayed):

1. The data does not get updated regularly enough to show current pages
2. The data should be “groupable” so I can sort by X links from X domains
3. The data is not sortable by Last Found or by Domain

So, the bottom line here, is that the data is great to have, but it’s not very useful on a larger scale; especially when you’re trying to look at hundreds or thousands of links and trying to see where your actual influence is.