Steven Chappell posted about a useful backlink checking website yesterday called Backlink Watch. The site comes across as quite spammy as there are a lot of text links on the home page and a lot of banner ads at the top of the results page. And due to the volume of backlinks it gives you information on, it can take quite a while to load up the results.
However, I would still recommend checking Backlink Watch out. There are lots of backlink checkers on the web however BackLink Watch lists some info that most other online checkers do not (most good SEO scripts do provide this info though).
After you enter your URL it brings up the results page, which displays the total number of backlinks to your blog near the top. It then lists information about 1,000 backlinks.
Each backlink listing shows you :
- Backlink URL - The URL of the page linking to you.
- Anchor Text - The anchor text or image which was used to link to your blog.
- PageRank - The PR of the page linking to you.
- OBL - The number of outbound links on the page which is linking to you.
- Flag - Any tag which has been added to the link to your blog.
It doesn’t seem to work perfectly though. In my report no PR figures were displayed. Also, out of the 25,000 backlinks BloggingTips apparently has, only 1000 were displayed. However, it isn’t clear which 1000 baclinks were chosen and why. Many of the links dated back to 2007 which makes me question how useful this is.
Nevertheless, the service does provide some interesting information. For example, at a glance you can see that the sites with more outbound links are sending you less PR than other websites which have the same PageRank, as they are spreading more PR juice around
I also think the flag column is useful as you can quickly see which links have the nofollow tag added to them. All of the nofollow links in my report came from comments on other blogs but this could be useful for catching out stingy linkers (ie. you link to them and they link back using the nofollow tag in the link).
Google Analytics is clearly a much better and much more reliable way of checking who is linking to you but with this site you can also check the backlinks of your competition and see what terms are being used to link to them. So it could explain why they are linking above you on competitive keywords in the SERP’s.
As I mentioned before, the report seems to be listing much older links for me, which is why I’m not raving about this as much as I think I should. However, it’s a free website and provides some useful info about your blog so I recommend checking it out.
Link : Backlink Watch *
* Website found via Monitor Your Backlinks With Backlink Watch
Rarst | October 22nd, 2008 at 1:20 pm #
Bit slow.
Took it few minutes to show 100 links… Out of 6000+ it claimed to find.
Robert | October 22nd, 2008 at 3:00 pm #
it is not too much slow i think.thanks for Backlink watch.it shows no follow or do follow.i liked it..
Mike Huang | October 22nd, 2008 at 3:18 pm #
Thanks for this wonderful tool
I could definitely use this. I used to use prchecker, but it doesn’t show other stuff besides the URL and PR.
-Mike
B. Durant | October 22nd, 2008 at 5:10 pm #
Too slow and like you said GA is much better.
Rajeev Edmonds | October 23rd, 2008 at 7:30 am #
Good tool, a bit sluggish though. But still a very useful tool.
Albert | October 24th, 2008 at 4:19 am #
Do you know any good site that build back link “slowly”? so that will not penalised by Google?
Steve SEO UK | October 24th, 2008 at 8:20 am #
You can’t beat using the link: http://www.yourdomain.com for results.
Notice I put a space between : and w. This works well for Google results.
Thanks for the info though.
Steve.
Child Safety | October 24th, 2008 at 11:47 am #
Good tool! This is what I have been looking for! THANK YOU!
Confirm Links | December 12th, 2008 at 1:56 am #
Nice tool little bit slow but very useful so slow will not be matter.
elite seo | December 12th, 2008 at 11:53 pm #
Nice tool, it displays 1000 backlinks only