In SEO backlinks are the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of their time looking for links. Trying to find link sources manually is no more an option. Whether you wish to research your personal link profile or scan the links of one's competition you need to use backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among typically the most popular SEO tools.
To help you in your pursuit of 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 perfect for running quick checks on sites' ranking profiles. It's free and very straightforward to use: you enter the url of the website you wish to check and Site Explorer generates a set of pages linking to it.This
You will find options that let you exclude the interior 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 enables you to check only 1,000 links per domain regardless of how many backlinks the website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an online backlink checker that helps you not merely see what sites connect to a page, but additionally 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 set of links from Yahoo! Site Explorer, so don't expect wider or different results.
3. Webconfs
Webconfs offers a collection of free online SEO tools. Two of them were created for backlink research. The initial tool is named Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It shows you what pages are linking to a particular domain and in what anchor texts. If there are numerous links on a page you'll see all of the anchor texts used on each page. The 2nd tool is Backlink Summary. It does precisely what its name suggests - provides you with a summary of the domains linking to a page and shows you exactly how many links are on each.
Just like Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools are also powered by Yahoo!, and so the results are the exact same and also limited to 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 would let you 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 by themselves crawlers and link bases while SEO SpyGlass queries a vast number 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 number of backlinks but additionally makes the service more expensive both for the organization and for the finish user. Plus large data sets are often harder to analyze and make use of. The search engine based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you only the links that search engines display producing a bit smaller link profile but you can run unlimited backlink checks at no additional cost and the data you receive is more actionable.