A new anchor text and backlink tool with a funny name – Neat-O Backlink Tool has just been made available. Anchor text is a powerful method for ranking websites as I mentioned in earlier posts on anchor text optimization as well as the phenomenon of using anchor text to ‘Google Bowl’ another site.
This tool is a little slow when we tested it but it does a fairly decent job. It’ll return a list of sites linking to the URL typed and the corresponding link text associated with each link. In some cases when it takes a while to access the site, it returns a ‘timeout’. In other cases, it returns ‘not found’. From the backlinks we see in the results, it appears to be using the Yahoo API.
Certainly, there are uses beyond just checking on your sites. You can use it to research your competitors sites and see where their backlinks are coming from and what link texts they are using.