In SEO backlinks would be the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of their time trying to find links. Trying to find link sources by hand is no longer an option. Whether you intend to research your personal link profile or scan the links of one's competition you'll need to utilize backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among the most popular SEO tools.
To help you in your search for links here's a list of hottest backlink checking tools and software (both free and paid).
1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
The grand daddy of all backlink checkers and possibly the single most trusted 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 utilize: you enter the url of your website you intend to check and Site Explorer generates a list of pages linking to it.
There are options that let you exclude the internal links originating from same domain or subdomain. You may 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 allows you to check only 1,000 links per domain regardless how many backlinks your website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an online backlink checker that can help you not merely see what sites connect to a typical page, but in addition provides you with some data for SEO analysis, including 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 a collection of free online SEO tools. Two of them were created for backlink research. The initial tool is called Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It demonstrates to you what pages are linking to a certain domain and with what anchor texts. If there are numerous links on a typical page you'll see most of the anchor texts utilized on each page. The 2nd tool is Backlink Summary. It does just what its name suggests - provides you with a summary of the domains linking to a typical page and demonstrates to you exactly how many links are on each.
Just like Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools may also be powered by Yahoo!, and so the answers are exactly the same and also limited to 1k links per domain.This
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're serious about SEO you need to have even more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that will let you 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 can be found in handy. These three tools can dig up a lot more backlinks to a niche site than any other 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 find more links.
Both approaches have their strong points. Employing their own crawlers allows gathering larger quantity of backlinks but in addition makes the service more expensive both for the company and for the conclusion user. Plus large data sets are often harder to analyze and make use of. The se based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you merely the links that search engines display causing a bit smaller link profile but you are able to run unlimited backlink checks at no additional cost and the information you get is more actionable.