In SEO backlinks would be the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of these time looking for links. Trying to find link sources manually is no further an option. Whether you intend to research your own link profile or scan the links of one's competition you'll need to use backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among typically the most popular SEO tools.
To assist you in your pursuit of links here's a list of hottest backlink checking tools and software (both free and paid).
1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
The grand daddy of backlink checkers and possibly the single most trusted 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 use: you enter the url of the site you intend to check and Site Explorer generates a list of pages linking to it.
You can find options that enable you to exclude the internal links via same domain or subdomain. You can even 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 enables you to check only 1,000 links per domain it doesn't matter how many backlinks the site actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an on the web backlink checker that can help you not only see what sites link to a full page, but in addition provides you with some data for SEO analysis, such as the title of the linking page, the anchor text of the link, whether the link is dofollow or nofollow, etc. The tool pulls the set 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 known as Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It shows you what pages are linking to a particular domain and in what anchor texts. If there are numerous links on a full page you'll see all the anchor texts applied to each page. The second tool is Backlink Summary. It will precisely what its name suggests - provides you with a summary of the domains linking to a full page and shows you exactly how many links are on each.This
Exactly like Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools are also powered by Yahoo!, so the results are the same and also restricted to 1k links per domain.
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're really serious about SEO you must have more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that would enable you to dive deeper into the link 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 a great deal more backlinks to a website than any 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 locate more links.
Both approaches have their strong points. Employing their own crawlers allows gathering larger amount of backlinks but in addition makes the service higher priced both for the company and for the end user. Plus large data sets are often harder to analyze and apply of. The search engine based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you merely 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.
