Backlinks or inbound links to a website is one of the most important factors for good search engine ranking. Website owners and marketers constantly monitor backlinks to a website to measure the effectiveness of their SEO efforts or to identify new link opportunities.

There are several paid and free SEO tools and online services that you can use to analyse backlinks. Here are 7 free back links analysis tools that you will find useful. 5 of these are completely free and 2 offer free and paid versions.

1. Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools offers in-depth SEO analysis of your website including detailed breakdown of backlinks, anchor text, and more. You can also download the backlink report in a spreadsheet. It is a must use SEO tool for every website.

How is it Useful?

You can use it analyse backlinks as well a range of other SEO metrics that affect your Google ranking.

You can only use it to access data about your websites. You can not use it to analyse competitors.

2. Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO’s backlink analysis tool is popular among webmasters and SEO professionals. In addition to the total number of backlinks, it provides the following information about inbound links to a website.

• Top Backlinks – see the Top Backlinks, including the Last Crawled Date, Target URL, Source URL and Anchor Text.
• Referring Domains – see the Top Referring Domains that are ordered by Alexa Rank.
• Top Pages – see the Top Pages, including the number of External Backlinks, Referring Domains and the date it was Last Crawled.

How is it Useful?

The free version of Majestic SEO is good for general backlink measurement including total number of backlinks to a site.

You can use to analyse backlinks for any website. However, in the free version, in-depth information is limited to the top 5 links.

3. Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz is another popular link analysis tool. The report includes the Page Authority and Domain Authority of the linking page which can be useful to determine the value of backlinks.

How is it Useful?

Free version is good for general benchmarking total numbers. However the free version offers detailed information on the top 5 links only.

You can use this tool to analyse backlinks of any website.

4. Link Detective

Link Detective a great free tool for backlink analysis. One of the best things about this tool is that it identifies the share of different types of backlinks i.e links from blog comments, articles, directories, etc., making it very useful tool to help with link building.

How is it Useful?

Free version provides full access.

It is the only tool on this list that categorises backlinks into sources e.g. comments, articles, etc. This can help you to identify high value links as well as filter out poor quality links that could be hurting your rankings.

The full breakdown of competitors’ links can help find out what backlink strategies they are using, and what you can use on your website to achieve similar search engines ranking.

5. SEO Toolbar by   SEOBook

SEO toolbar is an add-on for the Firefox browser so you will need to install Firefox if you want to use this tool. It offers a number of SEO features including backlink analysis. It provides the following information about backlinks:

• Total number of links pointing to a domain
• Total number of links pointing at specific pages on a website.
• Breakdown of incoming links: e.g. unique linking domains, .edu or .gov links which are considered to be more influential

How is it Useful?

Free version provides full access.

It can be used for SEO analysis of any website.

This is great all round SEO tool to monitor several SEO aspects of a website including backlinks.

It works like any other Firefox add-on and is very easy to use. All you need to is visit a site to get access to in-depth report on the site.

6. Link Diagnosis

This is a simple and easy way to analyse backlinks to a website quickly. While it doesn’t appear to find all links, it gathers a good cross section and is effective for quick analysis. It provides a full breakdown of linking pages, anchor text, as well as PR, PageRank, link strength and link history.

How You Can Use It?

A simple tool if you are mainly interested in getting a list of all sites that link to your website or your competitors.

7. Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing webmaster tools is similar to its Google counterpart. Along other SEO metrics, it provides in-depth backlink analysis and reports on the sites and page that link to your website. Before using the tool, you will be required to authorise your website by adding a HTML tag to your website.

How is it Useful?

You can use to analyse backlinks as well as to see how your site is viewed by Yahoo and Bing or to diagnose issues that could affect your rank on these search engines.

However, you can only use it for your website and not competitors.

Conclusion:

Backlink analysis is an essential part of SEO. The tools above are some of the most useful free tools that you can take advantage of to analyse backlinks to your website. They are equally useful for conducting backlink analysis of competitors which can help identify new link building opportunities for your website.

Do you use backlink analysis for SEO? What tools do you use? Perhaps you would like to suggest a new tool for this list. Please share your response by leaving a comment below.