In SEO backlinks will be the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of these time hunting for links. Searching for link sources by hand is no further an option. Whether you intend to research your personal link profile or scan the links of your competition you will need to make use of backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among the most used SEO tools.
To assist you in your pursuit of links here's a set of most popular backlink checking tools and software (both free and paid).This
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 your website you intend to check and Site Explorer generates a set of pages linking to it.
There are options that let you exclude the interior links coming from same domain or subdomain. You may also use advanced search operators such as for instance 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 your website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an on the web backlink checker that can help you not merely see what sites connect to a full page, but additionally gives you some data for SEO analysis, like the title of the linking page, the anchor text of the hyperlink, whether the hyperlink 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 very first tool is called Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It demonstrates to you what pages are linking to a particular domain and with what anchor texts. If there are numerous links on a full page you'll see all of the anchor texts applied to each page. The next tool is Backlink Summary. It will just what its name suggests - gives you a summary of the domains linking to a full page and demonstrates to you exactly how many links are on each.
Just like Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools may also be powered by Yahoo!, therefore the results are the same and also limited by 1k links per domain.
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're serious about SEO you have to have some more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that will let you dive deeper into the hyperlink 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 a lot more backlinks to a website than any other backlink checkers out there. The difference between them is that Majestic and Linkscape rely by themselves crawlers and link bases while SEO SpyGlass queries a vast amount of search engines and uses advanced search operators to get more links.
Both approaches have their strong points. Utilizing their own crawlers allows gathering larger amount of backlinks but additionally makes the service more costly both for the company and for the end user. Plus large data sets usually are harder to analyze and make use of. The search engine based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you simply the links that search engines display causing a bit smaller link profile but you are able to run unlimited backlink checks at no additional cost and the data you get is more actionable.
