How do you use the link data within Google Search Console? That is what John Mueller of Google asked earlier this month, and he got a nice list of uses for the link data within the Search Console.

Personally, I rarely use it but when I was reviewing Search Console, I noticed my link count spiked and it ended up being specific to specific post (a recap post). So I assume someone was trying to mess with me here (comment below if it was you):

Here is the post where John asked this:

Laurent Bourrelly responded listing out these use cases:

Old and new sites
Type of websites
Link placement in source code
No or very little keyword optimized Anchor Text
small and big (Majestic Citation Flow)
IPs
Chronology and acquisition velocity
Topics (similar and related)
Majestic TTF must match topic
Nofollow and dofollow
Majority from home country plus US and various
Majority from home language plus English and various

Andy Beard wrote:

Trackbacks
Technorati/Blogcatalog
Google Alerts (please don’t kill that too)
People commenting with a link
Free Majestic

Now that is old school!

Tony McCreath wrote, “It can help find out why Google is crawling some strange URLs.”

Terry Van Horne added, “I only look at it when cleaning up a mess some other SEO made. For me the GSC links are the links that matter. I realize it’s a “snapshot” so I merge that with Majestic. I review closely any I believe are spammy in the GSC cuz they are most useful for future proofing.”

Dean said, “Internal link data is more helpful to me and mine. Being able to understand which page types (subfolders) are getting the most attention, or not.”

Rutledge Daugette wrote, “If we’re not supposed to spend time disavowing, it’s not the most helpful tool sometimes. So many spam/scraper sites.” He shared this screenshot:

Did anyone miss anything?

Forum discussion at X.