What is the absolute best backlinks checking tool?

[sylviad]

Hi,

When I check my backlinks in Google using links:URL, it only brings back a handful of sites. When I use DnScoop (which I found here on the forum), it does bring back a good number of results, but a lot of them are all links from within my own site. As you know, these are pointless stats - who cares how many you have within your own site. It's backlinks that matter.

I have someone posting my other blog to the social sites and so far, she's done about 50, but when I run a search of that blog in DnScoop, it shows 40 back links which includes only one of the posts she made - and I do know she's done more because I sat there and watched her to make sure she knew what she's doing.

The one link that shows up is one she did today, but she's been doing them now since Thursday.

Am I missing something about using link checking tools?

The thing is, I've been trying to get backlinks for quite awhile on my older site - submitted to directories, SEs, done extensive article marketing and some social posting and blog pinging - but the links just aren't coming and neither is the page rank and traffic. (That'd be the site showing about 1000 links but a lot from within the site)

So I guess this is really 2 questions:

1) how to effectively check backlinks without including your own site that you're checking?

2) why all my work for backlinks and traffic doesn't seem to be working very well?

I understand that it takes time for sites to rank and draw traffic, but that older site is over 6 years old - although most effort went into it in the past 2 years. (I didn't have a clue in the first 4-5 years so I can't really count that.)

3) Don't your social bookmarking show up immediately or do you have to wait for the SEs to crawl them to get them listed?

Google did appear to sandbox my site about 6 months ago because I got P'd off and loaded it with keywords. It wasn't ranking, but they finally gave me back a rank of 2 (it had been 3).

So I started a second site as a blog on the same topic. That's the blog that my contact is now submitting to social sites.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Sylvia

[spanisheye]

The best tool for backlinks is Google Webmaster Tools. Submit your site and you'll get a breakdown of all the links it knows of. Forget Google's "Link:" tool...that's useless and always has been.

If you want some advice about a specific site it's best to post a link to it so we can advise better.

[sylviad]

Thanks, Spanisheye.

The old site is at www.book-titles.ca

My new blog is at www.natural-anxiety-remedies.com

I just went into my Google account and added the sitemap for the blog as I see I hadn't added it yet. The results for book-titles are the same as what DnSnoop gave, so I guess 1500 or so is all the links I have so far.

The blog is only a few months old, so I don't expect to see much there yet. But I did expect to see the links in DnSnoop from all the social posting my helper is doing since Thursday. So far I only see 2 out of about 50 she's done. That doesn't make sense to me because I thought social sites get indexed right away. Why are they not showing in my links?

Sylvia

[Odhinn]

Backlinks Checker Tool - Backlink Watch

[xga]

Google link command only show a small portion of the site's backlink. Use yahoo siteexplorer to get a better picture of the backlink. Yahoo allows you to filter off the internal links and show only external sites linking to you.

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

[J.Cole]

There are many tools out there, each uses its own algorithm to gather backlinks. So its quite difficult to determine which is the best. For me, I just stick to 1 tool & use it as my guide.