Which Backlink Checker Should I make decision off of?

[YoCrunch]

I have a few keywords that I'm ready to go after, and I'm trying to gauge how hard it'll be to rank with my keywords. I've been looking through a few backlink checkers, but they all come up with different results and I'm unsure which correctly shows how many 'important' backlinks a site has.

Option 1: Link Popularity Check Tool
Option 2: Backlinks Checker Tool - Backlink Watch
Option 3: SEOmoz | Linkscape — Unparalleled Link Intelligence

Which accurately shows the amount of backlinks that matter?

Also for you SEO gods: How much competition would be too much competition when getting started?

Flame away, i'd appreciate it if you could answer the questions when you're done though :food-smiley-002:

 

[tigis]

First of all, I'm not SEO gods or gurus or anything similar

Just want to share my experience. I have been using yahoo site explorer to check backlink competitions of my competitor.

About the level of competition, well it really depends on how much budget that you have. The more budget the more competition that you can enter. For me, I always consider free cost method first. If I can have let's say 100 backlinks freely with my own effort, then I'll go only for < 100 competitions.

 

[YoCrunch]

Thanks for your input, I checked out the yahoo site explorer and it's a good tool, seems pretty reliable. Is there any way to filter out the nofollow links from the count?

And my budget as of now is pretty much no budget (domain, hosting, gogogo SEO), so I guess I'm looking for low competition niches.

Im sure this question has been asked before, but while im at it - When ranking for a very specific longtail should I point my backlinks to the one specific page on the site that relates to the longtail or should I just point them to the homepage which is relevant, but not specific to the longtail?

 

[jody_w]

Point your backlinks to the specific page that is targeted around the longtail, preferably using the longtail as anchor text.

 

[YoCrunch]

Point your backlinks to the specific page that is targeted around the longtail, preferably using the longtail as anchor text.

Thanks

A few more questions:
Do backlinks on sites you already have a backlink from get devalued? It feels pretty cheap if a navbar link on a site can get another site 10k backlinks.

And does anyone have a reliable backlink counter that allows you to filter out nofollow links?


Also it'd be appreciated if a mod can change the title to " Which Backlink Checker Should I make decisions off of?"

 

[Hav3n]

Yahoo site explorer isn't that great.

Best way to use all of these tools is to compare them to themselves.

Its the only way to get apples to apples.

Compare a couple sites against themselves in SEOmoz and see who the winner is then do the same thing with yahoo site explorer.... see who comes out on top.


Btw... i count on SEOmoz since they crawl the sites themselves and aren't affiliated with search engines.

 

[Darkwing]

second vote for SEOmoz especially as Yahoo are messing around with link counts on site explorer now. Looks like they are gonna kill the thing soon (just my opinion)