Many people have been using search results to find the backlinks to their website by typing in search queries like:

• link:seofox.com in Google
• linkdomain:seofox.com -site:seofox.com

Well now Google has decided to let webmasters view which websites have been indexed by Google which are providing links to your website. This new feature is located in Google Webmaster Tools .

Obviously people are going to have the concerns of security and all, but the best part is the fact that Google verifies if you are the webmaster of a website or not by asking you to upload an empty HTML file with a specified file name.

Google will list all the pages that they have indexed from your website and they provide you with a list of pages. Next to each URL you will see the number of links pointing to that page. You can choose whether you want to see internal links (links inside your domain) or external links (links from other websites).

This is definitely a great new feature from Google and it definitely assists webmasters in finding out which websites are linking to them (that Google recognizes). You can also download the data into a table format and create graphs and charts (if you're Danny Sullivan). 

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I recently discovered the concept of having a soft launch for larger sites so that Google and the other search engines wouldn't think that the site was simply auto generated. I never really gave this much thought in the sites I build because they are usually fewer than 100 pages.

My question that I've asked is what should merit a soft launch?  What is considered too large and what would fly under the radar?  I've received several responses and the most common I receive is that anything over 1,000 pages should have a soft launch just to be safe.

Personally my conclusion is to launch any website in segments. If search engines like to see that your website is fresh and frequently updated then why not plan from the beginning to include a soft launch?

If you are building a larger then life website then you will want to make sure that your SEO firm has a soft launch plan. No matter how large or small your website is, having a plan is a big step towards whatever you want to call a success.

If anyone is interested in reading the soft launch article it can be found on SEO Rockstars - Soft Launch For Better Results.

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This question is asked of me at least a few times a week, so I decided to develop a tool to check it. While I am not going to let everyone and their brother use my API key and google no longer gives out new keys for the SOAP API, I will explain how to do this task. It really is not difficult and I am sure some of you will be making your own tools to do it quickly enough after reading this anyway.

First let's find out how many pages of your website that Google knows about using the query: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.yourdomain.com

Next let's see how many pages of your website that Google has listed in it's supplemental index using this query: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.yourdomain.com+***+-view

Now simply do the math to get the percentage of your website in the supplemental index.

How did your score turn out?

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Everyone is familiar with the famous search phrase "Miserable Failure" which returned a result of George Bush's biography on the White House website. This was done by some SEO Work which built up a good amount of links with the anchor text "Miserable Failure" pointing to George Bush's biography.

Google received a ton of heat from the white house (as well as a ton of press) by removing that result. However, Google refused to modify their results by hand, since that would be cheating the algorithm. Many other Google Bombs were created and Google still did nothing to fix the results.

So a few years later, Google finally came to their senses and modified their algorithm to find Google Bombs and make them ineffective. I would guess that Google modified their algorithm to find the following factors to find Google Bombs:

1. A good amount of links with exact same text
2. These links are linking to pages with no related content to the keyword
3. The amount of queries that keyword is getting

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