Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools

For years, Google's link: command (and see here) has deliberately failed to show all the links to a website. This came out of Google's fear that site owners simply wanted the data to try and manipulate rankings -- which was pretty true. Instead, they only provided a sampling of backlinks. Today, that changes. Google Webmaster Central is rolling out new support allowing you to view and even download thousands of links to your site (official news here and here).
You still won't get absolutely all the links Google knows about. In particular, links to any of your pages contained in Google's supplemental index won't be shown. But despite this, the amount of links reported will likely be massive compared to the "regular" link lookup command. For example, consider this query:

link:searchengineland.com

That's showing about 3,000 links to the Search Engine Land web site (note, for some people, you might see no results, due to an apparent glitch). In contrast, the new system within Google Webmaster Central reports to me that I have 57,000 links pointing my way. From 3,000 to 57,000 links -- what a different the new system makes!
Why make the shift?
"Webmasters have been wanting more comprehensive link data from us for a long time," said Vanessa Fox, product manager for Google Webmaster Central. "We created Webmaster Central to communicate better with webmasters and we take their feedback very seriously. We have been looking at ways to provide this data and are ecstatic to make it available."
Fox added that Google is also more comfortable releasing the data because it is going only to specific site owners, rather than to the world at large. In other words, site owners establish a relationship with Google when they verify through the Google Webmaster Central system. That lets Google show them more information individually but keeps information about all sites hidden from those who might try to misuse the data in some way.
What links can you get and how do you obtain them? The post about the change on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog is pretty comprehensive (a brief mention on the official Google Blog also here), but I'll go through what it covers and dive in deeper to the system as well.

The New Links Tab

To access the data, you have to be verified Google Webmaster Central user. That's explained more here, and it's easy to do.
Once verified, select the site you want to view from the My Sites screen. Then when that site loads, you'll see a new "Links" tab when you log in like this:

(Note: if you don't see the tab yet, keep checking. Everyone should be getting it sometime today).
That tab allows you to see either External or Internal links through January 15 of this month. Google expects to update the data going forward on a monthly basis.
External links are what most people are concerned about -- who is linking to your site?
Note that some people operate subdomains. Links from those domains aren't considered "external." For example, a site at "mysite.com" might have all these subdomains:

www.mysite.com
products.mysite.com
shoes.mysite.com
groceries.mysite.com

Because they all use the same root domain, as I've bolded, any links from a subdomain to the main domain will not be considered external. Also, any links to a subdomain (such as shoes.mysite.com) will be counted as part of those reported for mysite.com.
What if you want to see links for just a particular subdomain? No problem -- you should be able to verify each subdomain and then run a specific report on it.
By the way, Blogspot and WordPress users -- if you don't have your own domain, then any links to your site from another site within those domains won't be counted as external links. This is true for anyone using the domain owned by someone else. Just another reason to be master of your own domain in both of those places, which is easily done, as our 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines from last month covered.

The External Links To Pages Screen

By default, each page of your site is listed by directory, then alphabetically, with a link count next to it. For example:

In the screenshot above, notice how my root URL is listed first, then the pages are listed alphabetically (well, numerically -- and if you wonder why we use that number scheme at Search Engine Land, see Movable Type & Rebuild Safe URLs).
Here's another example of how page listing works:

mysite.com/
mysite.com/1page.html
mysite.com/2page.html
mysite.com/Apage.html
mysite.com/Bpage.thml
mysite.com/subarea/1page.html
mysite.com/subarea/2page.html