Using a backlinks checker allows you to find out how many websites are linking to your site or blog, what is the number of unique domains that these sites reside on, and what is the quality of these backlinks. In addition, some of the good backlinks checkers will show other important information such as the PR of the pages, where you link is found, the page and the domain authority, as well as the anchor text of your links.
What can you do with this information?
For starters, you could compare the backlinks that your main competitor has to your own and see how you can improve your link building strategy in order to outrank them. Keep in mind that your site’s SE position is influenced by other factors as well such as the age of your domain, the content of your website, and the on-site optimization. Listed below are some free and paid websites, which can serve as a quick backlink checker:
1. Yahoo site explorer – Yahoo! has announced that they would be shutting the site explorer down and this is expected to happen before the end of the year. However, until then, this is one excellent link checker, which can provide you with tons of useful information.
Update – sadly, Yahoo site explorer is now closed. Some of the functionality has been merged to Bing Webmaster Tools, however, you can check the links only for your own website and only after creating an account and registering (verifying owenrship of) the site.
2. Open site explorer – the free version could give you some valuable data such as the total links to your site, the total number of unique domains, where these links are coming form, as well as the page and the domain authority of the sites, linking to you. The paid version provides detailed reports for up to 10 000 links and additional important SEO data that you might need.
3. Link diagnosis is another backlink checker, which gives you the anchor text of your links, the link type, PR of the pages, their OBL, MOBL, the link strength, and more.
4. Backlink Watch is another free backlinks checker, which displays your site’s links along with the page’s PR and OBL, and the anchor text of the inbound link.