Thread: Best free source of number of backlinks information / how it works?

I want to check the number of backlinks for some websites and generally there is a lot of tools / websites / programs available, but the most popular would be:

- Majestic SEO (paid)
- SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer (paid)

- ahrefs.com (paid)

- backlinkwatch.com (this one is free, but it looks like you get what you pay for in this case)

- Seospyglass (software, looks good, but I am not sure if it is not to advanced for what I need etc)

I looked at all the programs above, and at the end I installed Webrank Toolbar for Firefox. It is showing the number of backlings for Google, and Bing (also Yahoo, but it is always 0, because they are merged), and Google infromation is not available for the most part (it is showing 0, while Bing might have 120,000 for particular website etc; sometimes Google shows like 42, 60 links, and Bing has always a lot more and this info seems to be the most reliable). Information comes directly from what's available in search engines after entering "link:website_name. I think)

Since there is no info from Google available on their own website and through Webrank Toolbar, how do all the companies that I mentioned above get that information? Is it coming from their own databases etc (like they would have their own bots crawling the Internet and indexing that information in the same way the search engines do)? Are there any other good sources of free backlink information out there (not necessarily addresses, but just the number)?

Thank you.

I know that SEOmoz has their own crawler and index with over 2 billion URLs indexed. This is how they produce link count. Their service is pretty good but I think $99 for only 5 sites is a bit high, IMO.

I've been using WebRank Toolbar for Firefox and I think that the info is based on "link:website_name" command only. The thing is that results for Google and Bing are different (Google does not publicly provide that information).

I checked 105 sites, so far, and I only have results for 21. On the top of that there is a major difference bettween what I get for Google and Bing; some examples:

- 45 (Google) vs 1060000 (Bing)
- 2 vs 85700
- 45 vs 93100
- 3 vs 351000
- 90 vs 91800

Is there anything like that, that are for free???

WebRank Toolbar for Firefox is free. You need to have Firefox installed and then just add the plugin. I thinkg it is good, I run in on all the sites.

majestic seo, open site explorer and ahrefs have free versions too

I tried WebRank Toolbar, I find it similar to SEO quake.

Thanks for the tools. It is great information here for me.