In SEO backlinks are the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of their time trying to find links. Searching for link sources by hand 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 use backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among the most popular SEO tools.
To assist you in your quest for links here's a list of most widely used backlink checking tools and software (both free and paid).
1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
The grand daddy of 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 list of pages linking to it.
There are options that allow you to exclude the inner links via same domain or subdomain. You can even 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 enables 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 url to a typical page, but also offers 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 set 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 designed for backlink research. The very first tool is called Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It teaches you what pages are linking to a particular domain and using what anchor texts. If there are numerous links on a typical page you'll see all the anchor texts applied to each page. The next tool is Backlink Summary. It does precisely what its name suggests - offers you a summary of the domains linking to a typical page and teaches you exactly how many links are on each.
Just like Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools will also be powered by Yahoo!, so the email address details are exactly the same and also restricted to 1k links per domain.
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're serious about SEO you must have even more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that could allow 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 come in handy. These three tools can dig up much more backlinks to a website than any 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 find more links.
Both approaches have their strong points. Using their own crawlers allows gathering larger amount of backlinks but also makes the service more expensive both for the company and for the end user. Plus large data sets are usually harder to analyze and take advantage of. The internet search engine based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you simply 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 info you get is more actionable.SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Resources : Back link Checkers to check on Hyperlinks in order to Any kind of Website.
