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Measuring Link Popularity: Comparison of Free Backlink Checking Tools

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Having your site rank high in the search engine for the topics that it focuses on is a sure way to have lots of traffic. Backlinks are one factor in ranking high in some search engines. Google's PageRank algorithm factors in backlinks.

What's a backlink? A backlink is a link from another site to one of your pages. There are lots of sites that can report your PageRank as well as toolbars. Don't know your site's PageRank? Just do a quick search for "check PageRank" and dozens of tools will pop up.

How do backlinks work? Without getting too detailed, here is a general overview of how it works. If your site has backlinks from high ranking sites that helps raise your site's PageRank. Other factors do come into play. If the backlink from a site has a "no follow" tag that is telling the search engines not to count it. So that's a useful feature to have in a backlink report. The "no follow" convention developed to thwart comment and discussion board spammers who would try to get 1000's of backlinks by leaving spam entries with a link to their site. The benefit of a backlink can also be effected by whether or not the linking site is in the same IP C class.

The anchor text (words that are hyperlinked) are also very important to your search engine ranking. If you want to rank high for "dog" and everyone links to you with the word "canine" then this won't help your ranking for "dog".

Recently I stumbled across some free backlink services and I wondered how effective they were at reporting the features described above. Although Yahoo and Google also have site tools that provide backlink reports, they don't necessarily include all the features mentioned. Also it would be useful to have a consolidated report of backlinks.

I ran my new non-commercial blog site, "Don't Have a Cow, Give a Cow Instead", through each of the services to compare results. This is a subarea of my main site allowing me to test if the reports handled "domain level" or "subdirectories" as well. My cow project site is relatively new and has only a handful of backlinks making it perfect for a quick and easy comparison of result numbers and features. I captured screen shots of the form and result pages from each site and will make a slideshow (shortly) and add it here. In the meantime you can click the thumbnails to view them.

Comparison of Free Backlink Checking Tools
Site Name			Tool URL		Form Page	Result Page
Number	PageRank	Top and Subarea	Anchor Text	No Follow	Embed	Pro $$
iWebTool			www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
25	broken	Both	x	x	x	maybe
Backlink Watch			www.backlinkwatch.com
26	x, OBL*	Both	Yes	Yes	x	x
Build Reciprocal Links			www.build-reciprocal-links.com
8, internal	maybe	Both	x	x	Yes	x
SEOAnalytics			http://seoanalytic.com/tools/backlink_checker
102, internal	Yes	Both	x	x	x	x
AddMe!			www.addme.com/popularity.htm
Yes by engine	?	Both	?	?	x	x
Valid Rank			www.validrank.com/pages/backlinks-checker.php
16,764	Yes	Domain	x	Yes	x	x
SmartPageRank			www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php
26	broken	Both	Yes	Yes	x	x

* OBL - quantity of outbound links from referring site
** Reports Maximum of 100

Is This Sort of Comparison Helpful? What Else Would You Like to See?

Let me know what you think? Should I do more posts like this for webmaster tools?

Did I Miss a Backlink Tool?

I'm sure I missed some. Please leave a comment and I'll try to include it.

Tags: | backlink | backlink checkers | cool tools | compare | evaluate | pagerank | ranking | search engine optimization | SEO