shadows2000 - 1:19 pm on Nov 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

The thing is, the third party tools show ALL links

And that is exactly the problem with these 3rd party tools, SEOMoz, Majestic and ahrefs all suffer from the same simple problem. Why is it so much to ask for just to return me all backlinks to a single website, with only one backlink per domain (and that one backlink should be the strongest link from that domain).

But instead no, they return everything. If the website has millions of sitewide links, you'll pay to get them all including; urls with endless paginations, urls with crawling errors (normally recursive) which haven't 404'ed, urls from duplicate sites on www and non-www and other subdomains, urls with potentially endless duplicates caused by setting different parameters in the url - particularly on search pages, urls that are simply erroneous with multiple slashes (ie. ///page.asp). Well after I've run the data through my own filters I find normally around 1-2% of the data is useful, and the rest, well that just ends up costing you, and I'm talking a lot if you run reports on popular domains. (with majestic prices over $100 per report - laughable right? The inbuilt filters don't help much either, and even if they did, the final kick in the &"*£ is the filters are applied AFTER you purchased anything)