In SEO backlinks will be the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of their time looking for links. Looking for link sources manually is no further an option. Whether you intend to research your personal link profile or scan the links of one's competition you'll 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 search for links here's a set of most widely used backlink checking tools and software (both free and paid).
1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
The grand daddy of most backlink checkers and possibly the single most popular SEO tool on the planet. Yahoo! Site Explorer is ideal for running quick checks on sites' ranking profiles. It's free and very straightforward to utilize: you enter the url of your website you intend to check and Site Explorer generates a set of pages linking to it.
You will find options that enable you to exclude the inner links originating from same domain or subdomain. You can even use advanced search operators such as 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 regardless how many backlinks your website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an online backlink checker that helps you not only see what sites connect to a typical 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 web link, whether the web link 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 were created for backlink research. The very first tool is called Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It teaches you what pages are linking to a certain domain and in 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 does precisely what its name suggests - provides you with a summary of the domains linking to a typical page and teaches you just how many links are on each.
Exactly like Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools are also powered by Yahoo!, therefore the answers are the exact same and also limited by 1k links per domain.
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're really serious about SEO you have to have more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that will 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 some other 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 quantity of search engines and uses advanced search operators to locate more links.This
Both approaches have their strong points. Utilizing their own crawlers allows gathering larger quantity of backlinks but in addition makes the service more expensive both for the business and for the finish user. Plus large data sets usually are harder to analyze and make use of. The se based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you merely 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 information you receive is more actionable.
