Backlink Checkers Review

Building high quality, relevant links to your website is a tough job, and I'm often asked for tips to make the task easier.

My advice: Spy on your competition.

There are free tools out there like Yahoo! Site Explorer which allows you to discover the links coming into your competitors' successful websites.

However, many free services provide you with just the quantity of links, with no indication of quality. They do not provide you with the information you need to evaluate the value of a link:

• Google Page Rank
• Whether the specific page is indexed by Google
• The age of the website (older generally being better)
  
• Whether the inbound linking pages have duplicate IP addresses
• The relevancy of the linking page to your business
  
• Anchor text of the link
• How many other outbound links there are on the page
• The use "No Follow" which means the link has no value to your site

I strongly recommend using a commercial link analysis tool like SEO Elite or Axandra iBusiness Promoter.

SEO Elite costs US$167 and Axandra costs 250 euros (and yes, these are affiliate links, and thank you in advance for helping me to buy new shoes for my children.)

SEO Elite provides a quick and simple interface that allows you to get the detailed information you need to analyse inbound links. Axandra offers more functionality,




There are other free tools out there that you might also like to take a look at, but I find these aren't available in such a reliable and effective way:

Link Diagnosis
iWebTool Backlink Checker