In SEO backlinks would be the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of the time looking for links. Searching for link sources by hand is no more an option. Whether you want to research your own link profile or scan the links of your competition you'll need to make use of backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among the most popular SEO tools.
To assist 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 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 make use of: 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 enable you to 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 from a particular website or all sites with certain TLDs (.coms,.edus, etc.)
Note: Yahoo! Site Explorer lets you check only 1,000 links per domain regardless how many backlinks the website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an on the web backlink checker that helps you not only see what sites link to a page, but additionally gives you some data for SEO analysis, such as 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 of free online SEO tools. Two of them are designed 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 in what anchor texts. If there are several links on a page you'll see most of the anchor texts applied to each page. The next tool is Backlink Summary. It does precisely what its name suggests - gives you 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 will also be powered by Yahoo!, therefore the results are exactly the same and also limited to 1k links per domain.This
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're really serious about SEO you must have some more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that would enable you to 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 website than any backlink checkers out there. The difference between them is that Majestic and Linkscape rely independently 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. Employing their own crawlers allows gathering larger amount of backlinks but additionally makes the service more costly both for the organization and for the conclusion user. Plus large data sets are usually harder to analyze and take advantage of. The se based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you only the links that search engines display resulting in a bit smaller link profile but you can run unlimited backlink checks at no additional cost and the information you get is more actionable.
