In SEO backlinks will be the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of the time trying to find links. Looking for link sources by hand is no more an option. Whether you want to research your personal link profile or scan the links of your competition you need to make use of backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among the most used SEO tools.
To help you in your search for links here's a list of most popular backlink checking tools and software (both free and paid).
1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
The grand daddy of all backlink checkers and probably the single most widely used SEO tool on the planet. Yahoo! Site Explorer is perfect for running quick checks on sites' ranking profiles. It's free and very straightforward to make use of: you enter the url of your website you want to check and Site Explorer generates a list of pages linking to it.
There are options that let you exclude the internal links coming from same domain or subdomain. You may also use advanced search operators such as for example site:/-site: command to check/exclude links coming from a particular website or all sites with certain TLDs (.coms,.edus, etc.)
Note: Yahoo! Site Explorer allows you to check only 1,000 links per domain it doesn't matter how many backlinks your website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an online backlink checker that can help you not just see what sites connect to a page, but in addition provides you with some data for SEO analysis, including the title of the linking page, the anchor text of the hyperlink, whether the hyperlink is dofollow or nofollow, etc. The tool pulls the listing of links from Yahoo! Site Explorer, so don't expect wider or different results.
3. Webconfs
Webconfs offers an accumulation of free online SEO tools. Two of these are made for backlink research. The first tool is named Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It demonstrates to you what pages are linking to a certain domain and with what anchor texts. If there are many links on a page you'll see all of the anchor texts used on each page. The next tool is Backlink Summary. It will precisely what its name suggests - provides you with a summary of the domains linking to a page and demonstrates to you how many links are on each.
Exactly like Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools may also be powered by Yahoo!, so the email address details are the same and also restricted to 1k links per domain.This
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're really serious about SEO you must have more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that will let you dive deeper into the hyperlink index, check more links and gather more data for analysis. That's where tools like SEO SpyGlass, Majestic SEO and Linkscape come in handy. These three tools can dig up much more backlinks to a website than any backlink checkers out there. The difference between them is that Majestic and Linkscape rely by themselves crawlers and link bases while SEO SpyGlass queries a vast number of search engines and uses advanced search operators to find more links.
Both approaches have their strong points. Employing their own crawlers allows gathering larger number of backlinks but in addition makes the service more expensive both for the organization and for the end user. Plus large data sets usually are harder to analyze and make use of. The search engine based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you simply the links that search engines display producing a bit smaller link profile but you are able to run unlimited backlink checks at no additional cost and the info you obtain is more actionable.
