I know there are lots of backlink checker sites (eg Yahoo Explorer), but how can I check for 1 specific link that I'm expecting to see for one particular site? Yahoo explorer allows you to save your first 1000 backlinks to TSV (so you can analyse them) but what happens if you have more then 1000 backlinks?
With the yahoo linkdomain query you can try excluding sites that list truckloads of backlinks and you can dig a little beyond the 1000. There are some tools that can dig up to 2000 or 3000 links, but a commercial site these days has 10.000++ backlinks so most of these tools are hardly functional. other ways : * open the page in a browser and see if the link is on it * check your apache log (spiders could follow the link and hit your site with the linkpage as referer) * take one of these reciprocal linking scripts and pretend you're the other site, it will check if 'your' backlink is on the page. * enter your link-deals in an unindexed phpLinkDirectory script and have it check every month if the reciprocals are online * if you doubt the page is indexed, use a blogspot blog and post a link to the page, then it's indexed next week etc.
An easy way to check for specific backlinks is to use the Yahoo Site search feature. Get all the backlinks and then download it to an excel file. From there, you can just search the file for the domain you are looking for.
Check you back links with the following tool and i hope you would see all your backlinks in a very organized form: http://www.online-utility.org/webmaster/backlink_domain_analyzer.jsp
I use this backlink tool checker, however you can only check 5 times unless you purchase the gold membership, but everyday it renews the 5 tries and you can try again every day up to 5 times. It lists ALL the backlinks your site receives.
you can type in to yahoo.... Linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com AND (site:www.otherdomain.com) This will show you what, if any pages on otherdomain are linking to yourdomain