Chapter 9 of our book helps you to measure the quantity and quality of your current links and shows you how to build new links to your content. All of the popular link research tools replicate the scoring attributes of search engines to give you an idea of the relative value of the links you have. You can use these tools to identify the links to top ranking competitor sites that might be good links to your own site.
Webmaster Tools Link Data
Because the search engines themselves are the ultimate arbitrators of link quality, you should start by reviewing the link data they have collected on their respective Webmaster Tool sites. These sites do not tell you where to find new links, nor show you the links of your competitors, but they do give you important insights into your own existing links by showing you the number of links to your site, which pages are most linked, and the anchor text for those links. Most importantly, they identify pages with broken links so that you can correct the page or you can redirect the bad link to a live page.
Commercial Link Tools
To get deeper insight into sources for new links, the commercial tools do a better job than Webmaster Tools sites. Most of the commercial tools listed below also allow you to import Google and Bing Webmaster Tools data to give you the best of both worlds.
| Tool | URL | Finds | Scores | Manages | Toxic | Price |
| Majestic | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | $50 to $250 |
| Link Research Tools | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | $129 – $1500 |
| Link Risk | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | $249 – $2999 |
| Moz Open Site Explorer | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Free/$99 |
| ahrefs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | $79 – $499 |