The Live Search Webmaster Center Blog reported yesterday that the backlinks feature has been made actionable again. The linkdomain attribute feature had been taken away in 2007 and then later a subset of back link information was included in the Live Search webmaster tools.

The new feature appears to return accurate results and gives the option of showing ALL backlinks, or excluding/including links from specific top-level-domain (e.g. .co.uk, .edu, .gov etc) domains, subdomains or domain folders. For example, you can use this filter to find all the backlinks coming from .co.uk or .gov sites.

The Live Search Webmaster Center blog posting goes on to elucidate some of the advantages of backlinks, including:

• Links show who has taken an interest in your product or service and may represent ways of gaining product feedback. They may also be potential sources of promotion.
• You can find out how what discussions are occurring about you in the world of social media by using the filter feature to target specific social media sites.
• Determining the quality of the links.

Since the number of backlinks can be very large, the tool also gives you the opportunity to download the backlinks into a CSV file for further analysis.

Filed under: Analytics, SEO, Social media by Martyn Whittaker