Backlinks are becoming more and more important in determining search engine rankings. There is even more emphasis on building quality incoming links to your site. Analyzing the links of the top ranking sites for a keyword is a great way to determine how hard it will be to get a top ranking and to get ideas for links to your site. There are some great free link analysis tools to help and to automate the process.
List of Backlink Analysis Tools
Backlink Analyzer
Free tool from SEO Book performs many of the same tasks as SEO Elite for free
Link Harvester
Free tool from SEO Book provides lots of details about unique linking domains, .edu links and IP addresses of back links
Link Appeal
Free tool calculates the desirability rating of having a backlink from a specified URL
Back Link Watch
Free back link analyzer tool
Link Extractor
Free tool extracts and lists the links from a web page
Recip Links
Free reciprocal link checker. Good way to check if links you traded for are still active. Checks up to 50 links at a time
Link Sleuth
Free software finds broken links on your websites
Dead Links
Free tool checks links on your site to find broken ones
Link Checker
Free tool checks the status of links on a web page and reports broken links
Touch Graph
Free tool makes it easy to visualize the relationships between related websites
