In SEO backlinks are the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of their time trying to find links. Looking for link sources yourself is no further an option. Whether you want to research your own link profile or scan the links of your competition you need to utilize backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among the most popular SEO tools.
To help you in your quest for links here's a set of most popular backlink checking tools and software (both free and paid).
1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
The grand daddy of most backlink checkers and perhaps the single most widely used SEO tool on the planet. Yahoo! Site Explorer is great for running quick checks on sites' ranking profiles. It's free and very straightforward to utilize: you enter the url of the website you want to check and Site Explorer generates a set of pages linking to it.
You can find options that let you exclude the internal links via same domain or subdomain. You may also use advanced search operators such as site:/-site: command to check/exclude links from the 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 regardless of how many backlinks the website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an online backlink checker that can help you not only see what sites url to a typical page, but in addition offers you some data for SEO analysis, like the title of the linking page, the anchor text of the web link, whether the web link is dofollow or nofollow, etc. The tool pulls the list of links from Yahoo! Site Explorer, so don't expect wider or different results.
3. Webconfs
Webconfs offers an accumulation free online SEO tools. Two of them are designed for backlink research. The initial tool is known as Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It demonstrates to you what pages are linking to a certain domain and using what anchor texts. If there are several links on a typical page you'll see all of the anchor texts utilized on each page. The second tool is Backlink Summary. It does precisely what its name suggests - offers you a summary of the domains linking to a typical page and demonstrates to you just how many links are on each.This
Just like Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools are also powered by Yahoo!, and so the results are the same and also restricted to 1k links per domain.
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're serious about SEO you have to have more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that could let you dive deeper into the web link index, check more links and gather more data for analysis. That's where tools like SEO SpyGlass, Majestic SEO and Linkscape can be found in handy. These three tools can dig up far more backlinks to a niche site than some other backlink checkers out there. The difference between them is that Majestic and Linkscape rely on their own crawlers and link bases while SEO SpyGlass queries a vast amount of search engines and uses advanced search operators to find more links.
Both approaches have their strong points. Utilizing their own crawlers allows gathering larger amount of backlinks but in addition makes the service more expensive both for the company and for the conclusion user. Plus large data sets are often harder to analyze and take advantage of. The internet search engine based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you simply the links that search engines display producing a bit smaller link profile but you can run unlimited backlink checks at no additional cost and the data you receive is more actionable.
