In SEO backlinks are the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of the time looking for links. Searching for link sources yourself is no longer an option. Whether you wish to research your personal link profile or scan the links of one's competition you need to utilize backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among typically the most popular SEO tools.
To help 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 most backlink checkers and possibly the single most trusted 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 the website you wish to check and Site Explorer generates a set of pages linking to it.
You will 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 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 it doesn't matter 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, including 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 of free online SEO tools. Two of them are designed for backlink research. The initial tool is named Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It demonstrates to you what pages are linking to a certain domain and with what anchor texts. If there are numerous links on a page you'll see all of the anchor texts used on each page. The second tool is Backlink Summary. It does exactly what its name suggests - gives you a summary of the domains linking to a page and demonstrates to you just how many links are on each.This
Just like Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools are also powered by Yahoo!, so the answers are the exact 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 even more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that would enable you to 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 great deal 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 number of search engines and uses advanced search operators to find more links.
Both approaches have their strong points. Using their own crawlers allows gathering larger number of backlinks but additionally makes the service higher priced both for the organization and for the finish user. Plus large data sets are usually harder to analyze and apply of. The internet search engine based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you only the links that search engines display resulting in a bit smaller link profile but you are able to run unlimited backlink checks at no additional cost and the information you obtain is more actionable.
