I have just finished a huge campaign for my new site, and I am trying to find an effective way to check backlinks. Google Webmasters tools and Yahoo Site Explore give me COMPLETELY different answers. Which one is most reliable for SEO?
Best way to check backlinks (most accurate but not cheap) is Majestic SEO – these guys have developed a multi-million dollar crawling system which is pretty extensive and gives most accurate results.
People recommend Ahrefs and Open Site Exporer but I personally do NOT find them that accurate as Majestic so if you have the money spend it on Majestic for sure.
Yahoo Site Explorer is being phased out so don’t expect the data on there to be accurate or up to date. Use it as a gauge but by no means as your main backlink checker.
If you want to ANALYZE backlinks, the best tool around is SEO SpyGlass. Free version is free for life so you have plenty of time to play around with the tool. Note that the free version only collects backlinks from 3 places – Yahoo, Blekko and Ice Rocket – so you won’t get a complete backlink picture by any means.
Paid SEO SpyGlass version collects links from over 400 search engines, I hear Majestic and Open Site Explorer are being added on but even without these the depth and breadth of backlink analysis you get with this tool is out of this world. Alexa, Compete and PR data, backlink keyword analysis in Title, URL and anchor text, Facebook, Stumble Upon, Google+ and Digg mentions, Google Yahoo and Bing cache dates, a custom LinkValue metric that aggregates many of these variables and assigns a quotient to gauge backlink SEO value.