In SEO backlinks will be the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of the time hunting for links. Looking for link sources yourself is no more an option. Whether you wish to research your own link profile or scan the links of your competition you will need to make use of backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among the most used SEO tools.
To assist you in your search for links here's a set of most popular 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 make use of: you enter the url of the website you wish to check and Site Explorer generates a set of pages linking to it.
You will 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 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 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 merely see what sites url to a page, but also provides you with some data for SEO analysis, such as the title of the linking page, the anchor text of the hyperlink, whether the hyperlink 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 made for backlink research. The initial tool is called Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It teaches you what pages are linking to a certain domain and in what anchor texts. If there are many links on a page you'll see most of the anchor texts applied to each page. The second tool is Backlink Summary. It will precisely what its name suggests - provides you with a summary of the domains linking to a page and teaches you exactly how many links are on each. This
The same as Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools are also powered by Yahoo!, and so the results are the exact same and also limited to 1k links per domain.
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're really serious about SEO you must have some more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that would enable 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 a great deal more backlinks to a site 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 number of search engines and uses advanced search operators to locate more links.
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 business and for the conclusion user. Plus large data sets usually are harder to analyze and apply of. The internet search engine based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you merely 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 obtain is more actionable.