incoming links | one cool site

Backlinks are incoming links to a website (blog or web page). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page and is used by Google to determine the PageRank of a (blog or web page). The Incoming Links panel we used to track backlinks has been removed from the WordPress.com dashboard.

Incoming Links were being pulled from Google Blog Search to display URLs around the Internet linking to your blog. They disappeared form our dasboard display and for months now WordPress.com bloggers have been asking on the WordPress.com support forum: Incoming links – where are they? Staff have provided two updates.

On Google’s Blog Search API page http://code.google.com/apis/blogsearch/ it says:

“Important: The Google Blog Search API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. It will continue to work as per our deprecation policy, but the number of requests you may make per day may be limited.”

So I’ve suggested we remove it as a default setting in the Incoming Links panel on the main dashboard. I’m not sure yet if it will be replaced with something else, or possibly removed as something that shows up by default, or something else that I haven’t thought of yet. — designsimply
Happiness Engineer
Jul 27, 2011, 3:44 AM

We removed the Incoming Links panel. The Google Blog Search API we were using before is no longer supported by Google. There are a few alternatives. One is to look at referrers in your site stats instead. Another is to use Google Webmaster Tools where Google does still provide a “Links to your site” report in that service. — designsimply
Happiness Engineer
Jul 31, 2011, 2:25 PM