These reports are very useful for two reasons:
- Working out what's popular when re-designing a site, and
- Keeping a list of URLs that will be used to set up redirects when you publish your new site live.
How to create a backlink report
- Login to you Google Webmaster Tools account (see the isntructions for Google Reader and Webmaster tools)
- Click on your domain name - > Your site on the web -> Links to your site -> "Your most linked content" -> "More >>" -> scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "Download this table" which will give you a CSV file you can open in Excel. Save this file and open it. Repeat this process for all pages of results (as only 100 are shown at a time). Try to assemble up to 1000 rows of results if you can.
- Compile all the results into one document.
- Highlight all PDF documents. Mark those to keep (and download them), and those you will ignore.
- Inspect the list by ordering it by "Links". Look for those links that are linked to from a large number of source domains. They are very likely to be amoungst your most important pages. Highlight these.
- If you can read the URLs and know what is on each page, order the list by URL, and highlight those that you know contain important information, do not remove tem, but mark them clearly as that they are no longer relevant.