Just announced yesterday, it is now no longer to be found in the webmaster tools. Well, it was great as long as it lasted ;-)

No, seriously, it’s gone again. But from what I’ve read, the new feature received a warm welcome by many and that may have triggered a backlink mania that could have overloaded that particular service. Let’s hope it’ll be back soon.

Update: Apparently the reason for Google pulling the feature was a security hole allowing to see other sites’ backlinks aswell. Google knows about it now and will probably put the tool back online soon.

Update: They’re back!

Google has added a new utility to the Google Webmaster Tools! You can now see all inbound links your site and to all pages. It’s a lot more precise than the good old link: search operator as you can see the exact number of inbound links for each page of your site. You can also search for specific pages and display their links. This also works for your internal links, so if you ever wondered how often you reference yourself… ;-)

This is what they say in the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:

You asked, and we listened: We’ve extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information.

(read on in the detailed post and see more screenshots)

Although it comes with a search engine typical delay, a lot of accurate data can be retrieved with this new webmaster toy. Go check it out!

Freshly posted in the official Google Analytics blog, Jeff Gills confirms the afore mentioned delay. This is what he says

Google Analytics users,
There is a temporary reporting delay within your Google Analytics accounts due to system maintenance. You are still able to log in to accounts and please note that no data will be lost - data will continue to be collected and processed during this time.

We expect Google Analytics account data to be fully updated and displayed within your reports before the end of the day. We apologize for any inconvenience this delay in reporting has caused.

Thank you for using Google Analytics.

Gotta love Google for their quick and transparent communication with their users, considering that most of their services are free to use.

Google Analytics updates are usually three to five hours behind real time for my domains. But since thursday 6pm GMT+1 no new data has been added to the statistics. I already noticed a few gaps in the tracking over the past days, but as I’ve posted yesterday, these were quickly filled some time later. However, such a delay is new for me and I’ve been using that service for quite some time. I wonder whether it’s related to the other Google issues that are currently being reported (Google Finance Down and Google News Goes Black Yesterday at SE Roundtable).

Of course analytics are still tracking, since the script is still being loaded and the according javascript function call doesn’t throw an error, but it’s odd nonetheless.

Update: Thursday’s data has been updated but still no data for whole friday.

I didn’t know they did that. My analytics were showing gaps in very busy hours with drops to zero activity and back up. Now, two days later, the gaps have been filled with what seems to be the correct data. I really wonder how Google does all that, I mean I know how it’s done technically, but I find it remarkable how much effort they put into their free services.

Maybe I’m the only one noticing or maybe that’s been a well known feature for years, but I was pleasantly surprised :-)