Links

The web consists of countless hyperlinks that lead users from page to page and site to site. Links to your pages provide Google with clues about the importance of those pages (Learn more about PageRank »). They also tell you where your traffic is coming from, and what kind of sites are interested in yours. In addition, it's a good idea to check these links before you delete pages from your site.

See other sites that link to yours Knowing which sites link to yours is important when building up your traffic and your search rankings. To see a list of pages, click Links and then click Pages with external links. You'll see a list of those pages Google knows have links to them. To see the sites linking to each page, click the number in the External links column. If you remove a page from your site, check this list to see if other sites have links to that page. If so, you might want to consider setting up a permanent redirect from the old URL to a new page. See internal links on your site Most sites contain many links to other pages on the same site. This page lists all the internal links Google has found on your site. This is particularly useful if you're planning to reorganize your site. Before you delete a page, check this list to see if any other pages link to it. If they do, you can prevent broken links by either changing or removing the original link.