In SEO backlinks will be 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 more an option. Whether you wish to research your own personal link profile or scan the links of your competition you will need to use backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among typically the most popular SEO tools.
To assist you in your search for links here's a listing of hottest backlink checking tools and software (both free and paid).
1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
The grand daddy of all 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 use: you enter the url of your website you wish to check and Site Explorer generates a listing of pages linking to it.
There are options that allow you to exclude the inner links via same domain or subdomain. You may also use advanced search operators such as for instance 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 of how many backlinks your website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an on line backlink checker that helps you not merely see what sites url to a full 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 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 these are made for backlink research. The first tool is named Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It teaches you what pages are linking to a specific domain and in what anchor texts. If there are numerous links on a full page you'll see all the anchor texts used on each page. The second tool is Backlink Summary. It does just what its name suggests - offers you a summary of the domains linking to a full page and teaches you how many links are on each.
The same as Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools are also powered by Yahoo!, so the answers are the exact same and also limited by 1k links per domain.This
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're serious about SEO you must have some more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that would 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 niche 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 quantity of search engines and uses advanced search operators to get more links.
Both approaches have their strong points. Using their own crawlers allows gathering larger quantity of backlinks but also makes the service higher priced both for the organization and for the finish user. Plus large data sets usually are harder to analyze and make use of. The internet search engine based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you just 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 data you get is more actionable.