The 5 Best Backlink Analysis Tools
Backlink analysis is a big part of what we SEOs do. Not only do we want to take a look at our client's backlinks, we also want to know about the links to our client's competition. Unfortunately, this kind of analysis can be pretty time consuming – an hour spent analysing a table of links might yield ten worth visiting and one worth contacting. Not a great success rate.
Traditionally, backlink tools would just return a big list of links – the more comprehensive the better. This kind of raw data is great, but the horrible truth is that it doesn't actually tell us anything. We either have to physically look at the results, or use another program like excel to manipulate the data into something meaningful. The perfect backlink tool would not only bring back fresh, comprehensive data, it would sort it for us according to what we find important, highlighting the kind of backlinks we're interested in automatically.
While no backlink tool is perfect (yet?) there are some pretty good ones out there. Here's a review of some of the best.
Yahoo! Site Explorer
Probably the first tool that any aspiring SEO uses, Yahoo! Site Explorer still offer the best free backlink analysis out there. Easy to use, you just type in your URL and get the first 1000 links to a site, as well as a figure indicating the ‘real' total.

The links are ranked in some kind of order of importance* and they're presented in a really user-friendly way. Don't get me wrong – all you get is a big list of links so it's useless for in-depth analysis, but if you want a quick starting point or a broad overview of a link profile, Yahoo! Site Explorer is still great.
*I have no idea how Yahoo ranks links, but the order matches pretty closely with other backlink tools which use a specific measure e.g. Majestic ACrank.
Webmaster Tools
Whilst not a backlink analysis tool, Google Webmaster Tools has backlinks in there. You have to verify the URL so it's only useful for your own or client sites (you'll get no info on your competitors here) – so why is it on the list? Well, most site owners use Webmaster Tools (right?) and it's cool because it gives you the list of links Google has found to your site.

It also shows the date that Google last discovered the link, which is a good indicator if you're linked to from trusted (i.e. oft-crawled) sites.
The pages on your site are listed in order of links, so the top-linked pages come first. This gives you a good indication of the most powerful pages on your site, and also helps you work out what sort of content gets the most links.
Drilling down a bit further, you can see the most popular anchor text people use in their links. The information is basic, but it's a good overview and you can identify any gaps in your anchor text.

Open Site Explorer
A recent offering from SEOmoz, Open Site Explorer first struck me as being similarly-named to Yahoo! Site Explorer, and trustworthy as a result. As with all SEOmoz products, it's nicely-designed and easy to use, with a big simple interface and lots of nice tabs and colours. The free version is pointless, only showing you information on the first 5 links, but I used the paid version for quite a while and really liked it.

Weirdly, the paid version only lets you see 10,000 links – this is enough for a lot of projects (I never found it an issue) but wouldn't you expect more from a paid tool?
Anyway, Open Site Explorer shows you the SEOmoz metrics of your domain (which are pretty good indicators IMO) and a broad overview of links and linking domains.

Links are ordered by Page and Domain Authority, and any nofollow/image/redirect links are clearly labelled.

Open Site Explorer lets you view four key metrics:
- Linking pages (like in the screenshot above)
- Linking domains
- Anchor text distribution (e.g. how many of each anchor text link to you)
- Top pages on your site
The top pages feature is interesting because if you run OSE on a potential link target, you can find the best pages on that site to get a link from.
You can compare URLs too, which gives you a colour-coded overview of domain strength/number of links to each site. Here we can see Piggynap lagging behind in Authority:

You also get two lists of links (one for each site) but there are no filter options (e.g. only show common links/only show unique links) so apart from a very broad overview the comparison function is a bit useless.
If you're happy with the SEOmoz Authority measures and you don't want to do much fancy analysis, OSE is a good tool. It's basically a list of links, with the type of link, anchor text and Authority – a step up from Yahoo! Site Explorer.
Majestic SEO
From £9.99 to £250 a month, Majestic SEO is a paid backlink tool, and in a way I admire that model. Why bother to offer 5 backlinks free when you can concentrate on an awesome paid offering? Still, paid tools need to offer something good, so what exactly do you get for your money?
Coming from Open Site Explorer, the admin looks hard to use – it's not very pretty and obviously aimed at the power-user SEO. There are two report options – standard and advanced. Standard gives you an overview of links, with a slightly complicated analysis of three versions of your domain:

Links are listed with follow/nofollow/image/redirect etc highlighted, and also the anchor text. They're ordered in importance using ACrank, Majestic's own ranking measure. The order pretty much agreed with SEOmoz and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

The cool thing about Majestic is that it gives you the date the link was discovered – if you run an advanced report you get a graph of your links over time (in case you were wondering, this isn't a graph of my site!).

Has anyone mapped this graph against content/PR? What a cool way to track the effectiveness of your (or your competitor's) marketing.
One of the results of having historical links is that some of them won't exist anymore. In the case of your competitors, this could mean a chance to get a link to your site (say if a sponsorship deal ended or your competitor removed a good resource people linked to). On the other hand, you may not want to have dead links in your reports. Fear not! You can filter them in or out with a few clicks.

Link Research Tools from Cemper
Another paid service, Link Research Tools is rather expensive at 20Euros for 24 hours or 1/200 for a month. You get a lot for your money however, including 5 types of report:
- Common backlinks
- Common outbound links
- Backlink/anchor text analysis
- Link juice analysis
- Strongest subpages
These report types are pretty self-explanatory – ‘Juice' is an in-house metric just like SEOmoz's domain authority or Majestic's ACrank.
When it comes to link analysis, this tool is the most comprehensive by far. It draws in link data from all over the place and gives you a huge amount of data in return.

If you're using Link Research Tools you don't have to go to Yahoo!, or Open Site Explorer, or Majestic – some of their data is presented for you. I think the only thing missing is Majestic's historical links. Interestingly, I only noticed Google Page Rank listed here too.

As you can see, there are a lot of complicated headings in the results page – I'd recommend reading the Help Text section. It tells you all about the different metrics and why they might be important to your backlink analysis. The reports also have really good ‘about' pages with text and video explanations.

The range of reports, including strongest subpages and common backlinks, is really useful and this, along with the sheer volume of information, is what makes Link Research Tool stand out from the other backlink tools available. Of course, you might not want to do this level of analysis but if you do, it's worth paying for.
Conclusion
It's not easy to pick a tool as the best one to use. Each does something different, basically getting more and more complex for more and more money! It really depends what you want to do – if you want to track links over time, use Majestic. If you want to know who links to all of your competitors, use Link Research Tool. I think as a standalone link tool Open Site Explorer isn't great, but with an SEOmoz Pro account you get access to the rest of their tools too.
Which one will I be using? Probably all of them 🙂
41 Comments
Carla - http://www.sorbetdigital.com/
Great post Zoe.
Apart from Cemper,I tend to use a mix of all of these depending on how much time I have for analysis and how indepth I want to be. OSE is very good for a quick snapshot of backlinks (esp competitors) particularly if I just want info on anchor text.
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WilliamC - http://www.seo-shop.com
Excellant post Zoe, tho I would have added http://linkrep.seofox.com to the list personally.
Potter - http://www.potter.dk
Thank you for a brilliant list and nice with a conclusion.
Personally I am very happy with SEO Spyglass too. It is not online but is a great tool for “learning” from others, by looking in to where they get their back links. It is free to try out.
Nigel Burke - http://nigelburke.com
I guess it really depends on your budget. I’m a budding SEO but do not have the budget for these tools. Maybe a post about various tools for wanna-be SEO people?
Tim - http://timhuegdon.com
Great post Zoe, but how about some links to the tools?
Dmitry Gushchin - http://easyseotracking.com
Great Post!
I like ‘Open Site Explorer’ application because it contains information on whether the link is followed or not. As the non-followed links are not important in the backlink analysis – this information is crucial for SEO speicalists.
You can also perform the analysis by using our tool: http://easyseotracking.com/niche-analysis-tool.php
Claus - http://hwacha.dk
This newly developed tool – http://sitexploration.com is running in private beta but is definitely something to investigate when it goes online.
Link Research Tools among best 5 backlink tools – new “CAC Amsterdam” version | Link Research Tools - pingback
[…] Tools at CAC Amsterdam Monday, April 12th, 2010 | newsJust as Dave Naylor featured us among the 5 best backlink analysis tools” in his review today, we are happy to present you a new version of our Link Research Tools. This […]
colin - http://www.ubisanmanagement.co.uk
great post. I’ve been using the SEOmoz suite of tools for a couple of months now and they provide me with pretty much all the research stuff I need. My first port of call with any potential client is Yahoo Site Explorer as it gives a pretty decent instant snapshot.
As a relative newbie to search, I also find their Q & A and forums pretty helpful too.
It can take a bit of time extracting tne useful elements from the link research CSVs, but not to the point that it’s a waste of time.
Rob McGuire - http://www.robmcguire.net
I’ve always thought that SEO Spyglass was a pretty decent tool for analyzing backlinks. It pulls the data from Yahoo and then lists out a variety of factors of each backlink.
DaveN
@Tim zoe said she didn’t want to ,..
Thomas Kupracz
Thanks for the great article. I think most here have been using a mix of tools – it tends to be that approach which gets you the best approximation of where a site / page stands backlink-wise.
Christoph C. Cemper - http://www.cemper.com
Hi Zoe & Dave,
thanks for also mentioning our Link Research Tools. We know that they still got a steep learning curve due to the high number of different analysis parameters, but we’re doing our best to simplify that in the next versions.
We just wanted to let you know that daypasses for the Link Research Tools are vaild for 72 hours like in the Beta version. Daypass user can also buy an extra package to get more analysis options. Our various parameter packages (all packages are included in the Monthly and Unlimited Superhero subscriptions) contain well-known indicators like Majestic’s ACrank, SeoMoz Rank, Alexa Rank or Compete Rank.
We also offer the option to upload files with a list of links from Google
Webmaster Console, SeoMoz Linkscape (Open Site Explorer), Sistrix and Majestic into the Backlink and Anchor Text Tool to make a full analysis of a site possible.
Further backend integrations are planned.
Also, we just launched our most recent version today
which features a couple of nice convenience improvements.
If you are interested in trialing our tools, we’d be happy to give away a couple “day passes” to your readers – just let me know how you would like to distribute them.
Best regards
Christoph C. Cemper
and the team
of CEMPER.COM and Link Research Tools
ady berry - http://www.i-com.net
I’ve been a fan of http://www.linkdiagnosis.com for a long time – while it doesn’t give as much info as other tools such as SeoMoz – the pie chart for good / bad / missing back links is great for client explanations. I use all of the above cept for Cemper (which i may trial)
What about the old classics too – http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php and http://www.randycullom.com/common_link.php 😀
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Miss Zed - http://www.searchengineoptimisationworks.com.au
Brilliant review – the Cemper one is also a new one to me – will go take a look and see if I can trial. Thanks!
Rick Mac - http://www.bestchoiceforebooks.com
A couple tools here I have not been aware of. Looking forward to testing them later this week when I do my research 🙂
Andrew@BloggingGuide - http://www.webuildyourblog.com
I also think I’ll probably use all of them too. A mixture of the strength from one tool and the strength of the other tool would really turn out great.
Top 10 Article Directories For Getting Backlinks! « Make Money Online « Sweet Businesses - pingback
[…] Web Directories can help you build backlinks – ExpoMarkets (ronmedlin.com)The 5 Best Backlink Analysis Tools (davidnaylor.co.uk)Backlinks Strategies for Getting High Google PageRank […]
edgar
How about Link Diagnosis? I have used this great tool for competitor backlink analysis.
Weekly Search & Social News: 04/20/2010 | Search Engine Journal - pingback
[…] The 5 Best Backlink Analysis Tools – Dave Naylor […]
Deluxe Blog Tips - http://www.deluxeblogtips.com/
I often use Yahoo! Site Explorer and see that it updates my links fast. The Google Webmaster Tools works a bit slower in updating links. Others I’ve not used, but will try. Thanks for sharing.
Kari - http://watches.ee
How about tool that shows all the kaywords your site is listed for…?
Mathew Anderson - http://onlinephduk.com/
Thanks, is there a tool to
1. Get all backlinks beyond > 1000
2. analyse those and display the most important links
I guess you will have to write your own code for 1,2
any tips ?
Thanks
Justin33 - http://expresslinkbuilding.com/
In Web Directories you can backlinks your sites by using the reciprocal and giving your HTML to links to other sites.
Kevin Bossons - http://www.kevinboss.com
Nice writeup! Would love to see linkscape compared to the other tools.
SEO Tips - Are All Backlinks the SAME - http://gatewaytospiritualenlightenment.com
And the race is on. Who can get the most PR 7 backlinks in the least amount of time and still have a site indexed by Google when the smoke clears? A little melodramatic? Maybe, but it does make a point. The fight over backlinks is one of the biggest SEO fights in the game. Everybody seems to think it’s the holy grail of search engine optimization. But is it? And are all backlinks the same? Most think they’re not. And while that’s technically true, they aren’t the be all and end all that some would think. This article explains.
Okay, let’s be honest. A PR 7 backlink is going to be worth a heck of a lot more to your web site’s climb up the SERPs than a PR 0 backlink. But how much different are they really? Well, for starters, in case you’ve been out to tea somewhere, Google has recently downplayed the importance of PR and even took it out of one of its tools. They’re not saying it doesn’t count anymore. They’re just saying that it’s not the big thing that people think it is. And personally, I couldn’t be happier. But that’s another story.
Truth is, I’ve got some sites that have PR 5 and 6 backlinks that are nowhere to be found near page 1 of Google’s search engine while I have sites with PR 1 and 2 backlinks that are on page 1. Why? What’s the reason? Well, the simple explanation is that there is a lot more to ranking with Google, or any search engine for that matter, than just backlinks. If that were the case, people would just beg, borrow and steal to get them. But even more important is the content on the site itself and even more important than that is the relevancy of the keywords to what people are searching for. Add to that mix the amount of time that the site has been online and………(?)
Lyena Solomon - http://www.netsprinter.com
About a month ago I tried out Raven – http://raventools.com . They have a pretty nifty dashboard where you can see all your seo performance. They have an incredible number of reports (customizable). They also integrate with Google analytics and track social media links.
Raven’s pricing ranges from $19/mo to $1500/mo. Each plan you can try for 30 days.
Lyena
Dennis - http://naturalhealthcare.web.officelive.com
I have been looking for a good back link checker tool for months. Usually I just go and use Yahoo which I found to be a very useful tool. I will check out the rest of these soon. Thanks.
Frank Van Soldt - http://www.massivesplash.com/
Awesome set of tools for SEO work. One tool not mentioned is SEO spyglass. The amount of great backlinks I found through that is phenomenal!
Josh Nathan - http://www.vid3o.net
I’m founded tools to get more 2500 backlink for your site from here:
http://www.cucde.com/static/linkback
Iulian - http://www.fresh-fruits.ro
Link Diagnosis is a really great tool…thanks for sharing
eSparkInfo - http://www.esparkinfo.com/
I live Open Site Explorer. Back link analysis tool is very important for all SEOs. But, I have mind bubbles with effectiveness of that. Which one is best? & Which one can give us best result which can help us to boost search engine ranking?
mhimurad - http://www.muradinfo.co.cc/
this is a good tutorial for us,who’s spending a lot of time behind backlinks.it is a awesome site about backlinks.thanks owner of this site.
bico - http://fazme1bico.org
its a good ideia to quick increase backlinks to pay?
Paul
I’ve noticed that these tools seem to be in constant flux. Will work one day but not so good the next. I guess there are plenty of people out there that don’t want you or me to know where their links are coming from.
Paul Craft
http://www.realtvreviews.net/xvt373sv/
Mel
Unfortunately Yahoo! Site Explorer will pretty soon, so we’ll have to stay with some other tools. I’ll stay with Majestic (though it’s too expensive for me) and SEO SpyGlass (which is definitely better than over-hyped OpenSiteExplorer)
David - http://opalpcsolutions.co.uk
Some great tools there – after having mainly used Google Webmaster tools I have tried a few of the others and have found them useful so thanks for the info! – As Paul says above though I have noticed the tools work better on some days than others (?)
Ashley - http://www.ashley-wedding-cars.co.uk
I have to say that I have been reading for days and days now as to which tool may be the best for SEO and in particular, to improving the number of backlinks one has. It seems that Majestic and Seomoz are well thought off and that Raven helps to put together or read information gathered from either Seomoz or Majestic.
What I can’t understand here is that if the two big players are for the purpose of SEO, why does one need additional tools to read understand the results. Why not an all in one package.
brian - http://www.ultraseksy.com
This post may be old be really useful still thank you for sharing….