The best free backlink checkers
One of the most important aspects of SEO is the number of backlinks a website has. If a site has a large number of backlinks, Google and other search engines will probably love it.
There’s an absolute tonne of backlink checking tools out there, some are good and some aren’t. I’ve decided to take 5 different tools, and compare them to try and find out which one is the best.
The importance of backlinks
Put simply, a backlink is a link from one website to another.
Backlinks are very important in the world of SEO as most techniques for improving your search engine ranking involve getting more backlinks. In general, the more backlinks your site has got, the more search engine love your site’s likely to receive.
The importance of backlink checkers
Many people use backlink checkers to peek at the number of backlinks their site has. A backlink checker really has no other use than that, right? Wrong.
By checking the number of backlinks a competing site has, and by checking the quality of those links, you can determine just how much work you’re going to have to do in order to get your site to the top of Google’s search engine rankings.
To get that number one spot, you need to find the current number one site for your keyword, and beat it. Now, a load of good backlinks isn’t necessarily going to get you to number one, but it helps.
Why each backlink checker gives a different number of backlinks
You’ll notice that nearly all backlink checkers will give you a different number of backlinks. It all depends on what the checker counts as a backlink.
For example, some count “nofollow” links and some don’t. Also, if your link is in a forum signature, one backlink checker may count all of the posts which contain that backlink whereas another, may just count that link once.
5 backlink checking tools and my opinion on them
Yahoo’s tool shows you all the links to your site (or a competing site). When you first type in the domain name you’ll get information on the pages on your site which are indexed by Yahoo and then when you click “Inlinks,” in the top left hand corner, you’ll get a list of all the sites which link to the entered domain.
The results are displayed in a clear format and it’s easy to find who’s linking to you and where exactly the links are coming from. However, there’s very little information about the linking site and so for research on your competition, it’s not a very useful tool. However, it is a mighty ego booster (wahoo, aaronfalloon.com has got 572 backlinks).
Google’s tool provides much of the same information as Yahoo’s. However, you must first verify your site before you can access it.
Again, very little information is given about each link so for research on competing sites, it’s not a very useful tool.
Google gave me the highest backlink count for my site (900) which is a lot larger than the results from all of the other backlink checkers.
I did like the ability to see the links pointing to individual pages within my site, and think that it’s a very useful feature.
If anything, both of the big search engines’ tools give you an indication of what they count as backlinks. This means you’ll know where and where not to go looking for backlinks if you want to rank highly say, in Google or Yahoo.
Link Vendor’s Domain popularity analysis tool
This is the first tool in this review to actually prove useful in research into competing sites.
This tool grabs information from Yahoo’s Site Explorer and does a PR check on each site. This gives you the added bonus of knowing how good the backlinks are.
This tool also gives you a quick breakdown of the results at the top, which I find very useful and could be of great use when researching possible niches.
I found answering the Captcha-results calculation each time I wanted to perform a search very annoying, and to get rid of it, you have to register!
Nevertheless, Link Vendor’s tool is nothing new. It grabs the data from yahoo and has stuck on a PR column. Personally, I think that the next tool is much better.
This is one of my favourite tools. It shows you all of the sites which link back to you. Provides a quick summary at the top and is amazing for keyword research.
When you search for a site, you not only get to see all of the links, but also a lot of information on each one. For example, you get information on the link’s anchor text, if it’s a “nofollow” or “follow” link and the linking website’s PR (though it’s not working for me at the moment).
There is however, a long wait for results, especially if a site has a lot of backlinks. It could take hours to get all of the information for a site with thousands of backlinks.
This tool groups the backlinks by website. Therefore, I can see which links come from a particular website. This tool also provides a nice summary at the top which shows you the number of indexed pages in both Google and Yahoo.
Nevertheless, it has very little information about each individual link, which makes it pretty useless when spying on the competition.
My favourite backlink checker
Now here’s the moment of truth, it’s time to announce the backlink checker which I think is the best. I do think that each backlink checker has its advantages and disadvantages, but I was still able to choose a favourite, Backlink Watch.
Choose the tool which you like the best, there really are hundreds out there. I’ve only taken a few of the most popular.
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One Response to “The best free backlink checkers”
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Primoz
May 4th, 2008
Great post. Thanks. You should write article about buying backlinks.