In SEO backlinks would be the single most precious resource. That's why website promoters spend most of their time hunting for links. Looking for link sources by hand is no further an option. Whether you want to research your own 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 help you in your search for links here's a listing of most widely used backlink checking tools and software (both free and paid).
1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
The grand daddy of most backlink checkers and probably 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 use: you enter the url of your website you want to check and Site Explorer generates a listing of pages linking to it.
There are options that let you exclude the internal links via same domain or subdomain. You may also use advanced search operators such as for example 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 your website actually has.
2. Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is an on line backlink checker that helps you not only see what sites link to a typical page, but also provides you with some data for SEO analysis, including 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 set 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 them are made for backlink research. The initial tool is known as Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer. It shows you what pages are linking to a particular domain and with what anchor texts. If there are several links on a typical page you'll see all the anchor texts applied to each page. The 2nd tool is Backlink Summary. It will just what its name suggests - provides you with a summary of the domains linking to a typical page and shows you just how many links are on each.
Just like Backlink Watch, Webconfs tools may also be powered by Yahoo!, so the results are the exact same and also restricted to 1k links per domain.This
4. SEO SpyGlass - Majestic SEO - Linkscape
If you're serious about SEO you need to have some more solid backlink checkers at your disposal that will let you 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 a great deal more backlinks to a niche site 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 amount 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 amount of backlinks but also makes the service more expensive both for the company and for the finish user. Plus large data sets are usually harder to analyze and apply of. The search engine based approach of SEO SpyGlass gets you merely 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 info you get is more actionable.