As usual, I somehow managed to miss Matt Cutt’s post regarding the Google Webmaster Console which allows webmasters to check backlinks to their website amongst other helpful tools. The Webmaster Console is designed to find more accurate listings of backlinks to your site than the previous "link:" Google search. You can also download the backlinks in the popular CSV format which opens the potential for SQL and database hounds to write a variety of applications centered around the data.
In addition to the backlink checker, there are Crawl Stats (statistics for pages Googlebot has crawled), Page Analysis (which shows you how Googlebot sees your site) and a handy robots.txt analysis tools to manage which bots to allow access to your site. Another great feature is the Preferred Domain tool which allows you to tell Googlebot how you want URLs to display in the index if www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com point to the same site. This is a will certainly be helpful with canonicalization issues (if you don’t know what canonicalization is, you can read Matt’s blog post about it SEO advice: url canonicalization).
The Google Webmaster Console is free of charge, however you are required to validate that you are the owner of your website by either placing a META tag on your index page or by placing an html file on your site for Google to approve access.
This is an excellent and impressive set of tools that I recommend all webmasters check out !!
