Can I tell Google about links to my site?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Ranesh in London. Ranesh wants to know, “Once you created backlinks in various sites, how do you tell Googlebot to recognize the backlinks created? Can you add a feature in Google Webmaster to upload a list of URLs that contains the backlinks to your website in a text file?” Unfortunately, Ranesh, that’s not quite how it works. What we do is we crawl the web, and as we discover new links from pages that we already know about, we’ll follow those links. You can submit a URL to Google. So we have, like, google.com/addurl.html, I think, is the page where you can submit an individual page to Google. But in general, what works best is if we find the links ourselves as we’re crawling the web. It’s not all that helpful if the links that you are presenting to Google that you have found to your site are so low in terms of page rank, or so hard to discover on the web, that you have to tell us where they are. It almost kind of defeats the purpose a little bit. Because what we tend to find, is the link that we find on our own, as we’re crawling the web, tend to be of higher quality. So right now, we don’t have, really, a massive way to say, hey, here are all the sites that link to my site. Now remember that you can upload a site map, which is a list of all the URLs on your site. But even then, we don’t guarantee that uploading a site map will get all of your pages indexed. It’s just a way that you can tell Google, these are the pages on my site. Hope that helps.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: