In SEO backlinks will be the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of their time trying to find links. Looking for link sources by hand is no more an option. Whether you want to research your own 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 the most used SEO tools.
To help you in your pursuit of links here's a list of most popular backlink checking tools and software (both free and paid).
1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
The grand daddy of backlink checkers and perhaps the single most popular 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 utilize: you enter the url of your website you want to check and Site Explorer generates a list of pages linking to it.
You can find options that enable you to exclude the interior links via same domain or subdomain. You can even 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 your website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an on line backlink checker that can help you not merely see what sites connect to a page, but also gives you 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 free online SEO tools. Two of them are designed for backlink research. The initial tool is called Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It teaches you what pages are linking to a specific domain and with what anchor texts. If there are several links on a page you'll see all the anchor texts utilized on each page. The next tool is Backlink Summary. It will precisely what its name suggests - gives you a summary of the domains linking to a page and teaches you exactly how many links are on each.
The same as Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools are also powered by Yahoo!, so the results 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 have to have some more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that could enable you to 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 can be found in handy. These three tools can dig up a whole lot more backlinks to a site than every other backlink checkers out there. The difference between them is that Majestic and Linkscape rely on their own crawlers and link bases while SEO SpyGlass queries a vast number of search engines and uses advanced search operators to locate more links.This
Both approaches have their strong points. Using their own crawlers allows gathering larger number 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 se based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you just the links that search engines display resulting in a bit smaller link profile but you can run unlimited backlink checks at no additional cost and the data you obtain is more actionable.