Best Link Analysis Tool?

[Bandicoot]

Now that the Yahoo Site Explorer is not usable on sites unless they are in your Bing Webmaster Tools, what is the best tool out there to see an accurate list of inbound links to a site? Google tools are still pretty unreliable from what I can see...

[pointblankseo]

Agree to disagree. It's never good to go just one route, but as shown in this study: http://www.rankabove.com/news/seo-research/backlink-data-provider-all/ Majestic SEO is really the only other good one, but as you can see, the amount of link rot that shows up is enormous. That's why I use OSE for just about all of my backlink analysis in terms of historical.

I do use Majestic SEO for one thing though: their fresh index to find out how your competitors are building links in the past couple months.

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

That's great.  I just got a huge dose of how good their ranking data from a tool that an SEO software developer showed me.

There's so much data out there that it's hard to keep up even though I remember in the past seeing SEMRush being one of the better tools.

I look forward to seeing the tool(s).

[Bandicoot]

thanks Andy

[Bandicoot]

Hey Jon - I don't even think that MOZ would dub the sole use of OSE as "the right route." As you can see from the other posts, there are several tools from several companies that will probably give me the best combined backlink analysis. The data in OSE is usually solid, but, as mentioned by SeattleOrganicSEO above, it's normally not the most recent. Thanks though!

[Bandicoot]

Thanks!

[MentorMate]

SEMRush is working on providing backlink data. They don't have much yet and it's in beta, but I anticipate that soon it will be yet another great option considering how many great tools they have and how effective they are at collecting absurd amounts of valuable data. This was one of my 2012 predictions that already came true

[pointblankseo]

Although the loss of YSE stings, it's actually making link builders go the right route by using Open Site Explorer exclusively, because it gives you a ton more data, and with this data the analytical possibilities are endless.

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

Oh, I forgot, but Blekko also does inbound link checks and gives you detail.  I don't have the exact link, but if you can manipulate the following one where you insert your website instead of mine, you can use it too.

http://blekko.com/ws/http:%2F%2Fseattleorganicseo.com%2F+/domainlinks

So, just replace the http://seattleorganicseo.com with your website you're checking.

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

I love Open Site Explorer (SEOMoz's tool), but the data might not always be the most recent.

I subscribe to Majestic SEO, but it will cost you money...somewhere around $75 or so U.S.

Raven has some great tools and probably the best on the market, but is not always the easiest for a first timer to figure out.

Google Webmasters also is a good gauge if you can regularly dive in there and check out what google sees.

There's a number of tools in this list: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/01/24/the-ultimate-list-of-rank-checkers/ that perform the backlink checks and details.