Backlink Watch Rating: 1 Star

Of all the potential viable alternatives to Yahoo Site Explorer, this one is perhaps the option with the least amount of glitz and glamour.  Certainly it will not be earning any pulitzer prizes any time soon for graphics design and user interface creativity.  In addition, the popups for SEO services tend to get a bit overwhelming at times and borderline annoying, but if you are willing and able to look past all that, you’ll likely still find that the tool does have some merits and is worth playing around with some.

What it lacks in visual creativity, it does make up for a bit in usefulness.  The tool will allow you to see up to 1,000 backlinks to a given domain, and for particularly smaller sites that may not have a lot of backlinks, this could be more than sufficient anyways.  I’m not entirely sure what data source they use to generate their report, but it does seem to have useful data in the output so I find myself coming back to this tool from time to time to see what it has to say about a given domain or URL.

Once you enter your search, you’ll have to wade through the popup box, and the annoying flashy banners at the top right of the site.  I get the hint that perhaps they are trying to get you to buy some of the SEO services they are offering .

One nice feature is that they will scan every backlink for you in real time.  The tool gives you a list of the remaining backlinks to be checked, and as it is going it will reveal the following items:

1. URL
2. Anchor Text
3. PageRank
4. Outbound Links (OBL)
5. Flag (nofollow)

All in all, I can’t complain too much about the popups, links, or banners because the service is free afterall, AND it gives me up to 1,000 backlinks which most services to not offer without a charge of some kind.   If you are looking for a low overhead, VERY simple tool that is straight to the point, then this may fit the bill nicely.

If you happen to find out what data source they use to collect the backlinks from I would love to know!

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