In SEO backlinks are the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of the time looking for links. Looking for link sources manually is no further an option. Whether you want to research your own personal link profile or scan the links of one's competition you will need to make use of backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among typically the most popular SEO tools.
To assist you in your search for links here's a listing of most widely used backlink checking tools and software (both free and paid).
1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
The grand daddy of backlink checkers and possibly the single most popular 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 the website you want to check and Site Explorer generates a listing of pages linking to it.
You can find options that allow you to exclude the interior links originating from same domain or subdomain. You can even use advanced search operators such as for instance 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 it doesn't matter how many backlinks the website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an on line backlink checker that helps you not merely see what sites url to a typical page, but additionally 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 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 these are designed for backlink research. The initial tool is called Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It teaches you what pages are linking to a certain domain and with what anchor texts. If there are many links on a typical page you'll see all the anchor texts used on each page. The second tool is Backlink Summary. It will just what its name suggests - provides you with a summary of the domains linking to a typical page and teaches you exactly how many links are on each.
The same as Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools may also be powered by Yahoo!, so the email address details are the same and also limited to 1k links per domain.
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're serious about SEO you must have even more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that could allow 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 far more backlinks to a 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 locate more links.
Both approaches have their strong points. Employing their own crawlers allows gathering larger amount of backlinks but additionally makes the service more expensive both for the business and for the end user. Plus large data sets are generally harder to analyze and take advantage of. The se based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you only the links that search engines display causing a bit smaller link profile but you can run unlimited backlink checks at no additional cost and the data you obtain is more actionable.This
