In SEO backlinks are the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of the time hunting for links. Trying to find link sources manually is no longer an option. Whether you want to research your own personal link profile or scan the links of your competition you need to utilize backlink checkers for this. That's why backlink checking apps are among typically the most popular SEO tools.
To assist you in your pursuit of 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 most backlink checkers and perhaps 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 utilize: you enter the url of the site you want to check and Site Explorer generates a set of pages linking to it.
You can find options that allow you to exclude the interior links coming 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 it doesn't matter how many backlinks the site actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an online backlink checker that can help you not only see what sites link to a typical page, but also offers you some data for SEO analysis, such as the title of the linking page, the anchor text of the web link, whether the web link is dofollow or nofollow, etc. The tool pulls the list of links from Yahoo! Site Explorer, so don't expect wider or different results.This
3. Webconfs
Webconfs offers an accumulation of free online SEO tools. Two of these are designed for backlink research. The first tool is known as Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It teaches you what pages are linking to a particular domain and with what anchor texts. If there are numerous links on a typical page you'll see all the anchor texts used on each page. The second tool is Backlink Summary. It will exactly 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 are also powered by Yahoo!, so the email address details are the same and also limited by 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 web 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 much more backlinks to a website than some 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 locate more links.
Both approaches have their strong points. Utilizing their own crawlers allows gathering larger quantity of backlinks but also makes the service higher priced both for the business and for the finish user. Plus large data sets are generally harder to analyze and make use 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 data you receive is more actionable.