Backlink analysis tools show which websites link to a given domain, with what anchor text, and how the profile develops over time. It is important to know that every commercial tool has its own index obtained through its own crawling of the web, so the link counts differ between them, sometimes several times over, and none of them corresponds exactly to what the search engine sees. The most reliable source about your own website remains the webmaster tools from the search engine itself, which, however, do not provide data on competitors – and it is precisely competitors that are the main reason for using a paid tool. In practice it is worth using one tool consistently and tracking developments within it, rather than comparing absolute figures between different sources.
See also: Backlink profile, Competitor Backlink Analysis, Domain authority.
