In SEO backlinks will be the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of their time hunting for links. Trying to find 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 make use of backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among the most popular SEO tools.This
To assist you in your pursuit of links here's a list of hottest 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 make use of: you enter the url of the website you wish to check and Site Explorer generates a list of pages linking to it.
There are options that let you exclude the inner links via same domain or subdomain. You can also use advanced search operators such as site:/-site: command to check/exclude links from the 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 the website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an online backlink checker that can help you not only see what sites link to a typical page, but also provides you with some data for SEO analysis, including the title of the linking page, the anchor text of the link, whether the 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 are made for backlink research. The very first tool is named Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It shows 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 of the anchor texts utilized on each page. The second tool is Backlink Summary. It will exactly what its name suggests - provides you with a summary of the domains linking to a typical page and shows you how many links are on each.
Just like Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools are also powered by Yahoo!, so the answers are the exact same and also restricted to 1k links per domain.
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're really serious about SEO you need to have even more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that would let you 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 much more backlinks to a niche site than any 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 get more links.
Both approaches have their strong points. Employing their own crawlers allows gathering larger quantity of backlinks but also makes the service more costly both for the organization and for the end user. Plus large data sets are generally harder to analyze and take advantage 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 are able to run unlimited backlink checks at no additional cost and the information you obtain is more actionable.
