Overview: Analyze your link profile compared to competing websites, and find pages which would be great sources to get links from. Many modern major search engines consider links to be signs of trust or votes for websites. Great in content links also can send a large stream of targeted high value traffic.

At the bottom of this page I inserted a few free videos to help you better understand link building.

Competitive Research Tools With Link Information

• SEO Toolbar – Imports link data from various sources and makes it quite easy to compare sites against each other.
• SEO for Firefox – Import useful marketing data (including link counts, with links to source data) right into Google and Yahoo search results.
• Xinu – free competitive analysis tool which pulls in site age, social bookmarking data, and link data. grab the source

Our Free Link Analysis Tools

Back Link Analyzer

Back Link Analyzer – free Windows based downloadable software.

• downloadable software
• does link anchor text analysis
• fairly quick
• works with Yahoo! API

Link Harvester

Link Harvester – allows you to deeply query the Yahoo! database and gives a good amount of link details.

• web based
• really fast
• makes sorting out duplicate links from the same site easy, which allows you to quickly and deeply query the Yahoo! backlink database.
• does not give anchor text
• gives breakdowns of .edu links and number of C block IP addresses, etc.

Hub Finder

Hub Finder – this tool comes as a bonus when you join our training program. It finds topically related pages by looking at link co-citation. post about tool

• web based
• really fast
• makes finding hub pages easy

Other Link Analysis Tools We Offer

• Web Directories Reviewed – editorial post about what directories are the most valuable from an SEO perspective.
• Reciprocal Link Checker – script to help you automate finding out if your reciprocal link partners are still linking back at your site.
• Link Suggest Tool – list of words and phrases like add URL, directory, ezine, etc. where you may be able to add links or buy ads.
• Link Popularity Comparison Tool – allows you to quickly and easily compare your link popularity scores to other websites.
• Internal PageRank flow Calculator – allows you to see how your internal link structure flows PageRank throughout your site. grab the source code

Link Research From the Search Engines

• Yahoo! Site Explorer – allows you to see what pages you have indexed as well as the backlinks to those pages
• Google Webmaster Central – allows you to sign up for Google Sitemaps, shows some crawling errors, broken links, and a fairly comprehensive view of your backlinks. You can also add anchor text checking to Google Webmaster Central by using this free Greasemonkey script.

Other Free Link Analysis Tools

• Xenu Link Sleuth – Downloadable software which makes it fast and easy to find broken links on your site.
• Backlink Watch – shows backlinks and anchor text used in the backlinks

Paid Backlink Analysis Tools

• Advanced Link Manager – downloadable software in combination with Advanced Web Ranking for $149.
• LinkScape – similar to Majestic SEO, with a few more features, but limits your search depth to 500 results.
• Majestic SEO – link anchor index that allows you to download an in depth link profile for any site.

Background Information on Link Building

These three videos are all short (7 to 15 minutes each), sweet, and done by me.