Link Analysis Tool : The ultimate open source SEO tool

Link Analysis Tool : The ultimate open source SEO tool

Backlink analysis is a trick business and can be quite resource hungry. That’s why I’ve started developing an open source Link Analysis Tool.

The tool is currently in Beta and you can download it here. My idea is that by releasing this as an open source project other programmers and skilled people can help me improve the tool based on feature requests and bug reports from the community.

The script has an auto installer to set up the Mysql databases, you will need a Yahoo API - details are in the readme. Please leave feedback and feature requests in the comments below, if any PHP programmers want to contribute then drop me an email.

What it does

  • Uses Yahoo Site Explorer to find all pages on a site
  • Pulls in link data for every page on the site & orders results by pages with the most links
  • Allows you to drill down 2 levels deep into the link data for pages linking to the target site
  • Accepts Google sitemaps imports
  • Accepts single URL imports
  • Lets you check the rankings for any page on any search engine

Example: I enter my competitors url and the tool brings up a list of all their pages with the most linked pages at the top of the list. I can then drill down to find not only the exact sites linking to these pages but the sites that link to the linking pages as well. This allows me to very quickly evaluate the most valuable links to target for myself.

Screenshots

analysis1.gif

analysis2.gif

analysis3.gif

Licensing

You can distribute the script as you wish in any form (for example with your own branding), all I ask is that you leave the “About this tool” link on the right hand side of each page and the designers link at the bottom. Selling the script is not permitted.

53 Reader Comments leave yours >>

Sweet! I can really use that. Not much more I can say.

 

The only thing it is missing in a log analyzer so it can daily parse the logs for all referring URLs and then check those pages for links back to the page showing the entry.

In this way it starts to auto discover the links since Yahoo only shows a small subset of links once you get to a certain number.

 

Now that’s hot! I’m gonna download this and give it a whirl.

The feature I’m excited about is google sitemaps import. Daddy like!

 

Why thats mighty noble of you patrick.
Will take a spin and see if any coding can be applied to improve.

Azzam

 

Patrick - this is a seriously useful tool! Thanks for sharing.

Best wishes,

Howie

 

I really appreciate the great tool, I’ll try to contribute to it as much as possible.

 

Hi,

Thanks for this.
But I’m getting this error message.

Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /linkanalysis/index.php on line 45

What could I have done wrong?

Thanks for your help.

yoichi   March 28, 2008 5:48 pm | Reply

Not sure, have you looked in phpmyadmin to see if the databases are set up?

 
 

Hi,

Seems like a really useful tool, but I get zero (0) links for any url on any website I test with. Even though there are some results when I try Yahoo’s site. (?)

Thanks for your help.

Carl-Johan Hunefalk   March 28, 2008 9:14 pm | Reply

Maybe your host isn’t allowing the connection to Yahoo?

 
 

Thanks for the great tool Patrick. Can’t wait to get it installed and analysing!

 

Seems like a great tool, thanks a lot. Am playing with it now.

I don’t see yet the PR in my overview, am I missing something?

Gemme   March 28, 2008 10:12 pm | Reply

Are you seeing PR0 or what? Can you post a screenshot?

 
 

I also get this error message appearing in the error log after trying to add a site through addsite.php

 

You can’t downplay the completely invaluable nature of this tool for evaluating your OWN website, to figure out how relevant your linking neighborhood is, etc.

I’m pretty stoked to get a real clear picture of where my site is at. (And maybe then I can get some insight on the kind of Twitter followers I’ve been attracting, too!)

 

It’s up and running great. I have been looking for a way to see which pages of my sites are getting links. This really helps a lot.

Thanks for sharing this. Excellent link analysis tool!

 

How will your software compare to SEO SpyGlass?

SEO-Alchemist   March 29, 2008 3:42 am | Reply

I’m not sure, never used SpyGlass.

 
 

Looking good so far. I to am unable to see the PR column. It’s missing from the list of domains on the home page and also the link analysis of the website.

FYI On the first pass it didn’t capture the number of links correctly - in fact it returned everything as 0 - the same as Carl-Johan above. I refreshed one entry manually and it then displayed link numbers so I refreshed the entire domain and the correct link numbers were displayed. :)

Del   March 29, 2008 4:08 am | Reply

Maybe the path to your PageRank images is broken? Can you see in the source code of the page where they are loading from?

 
 

Hi Patrick, thanks for this great tool. I came to your site from the SEO Book forums, great information there.

 

Thanks very much for the tool! But the same information is already given in Google Webmaster Central or am I missing something?

What I would love to find is a tool that also shows the anchortexts of the inbounds. Not a simple list of all anchortexts, but a statistical overview of all anchors:
70% anchortext1
8% anchortext2
etc.

Is there something like that out there?

Thanks again,
Alain

AlainS   March 29, 2008 5:07 am | Reply

Google doesn’t let you see your competitors backlink information.

If you want anchor text try http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/

 
 

I’m getting this message
Spider results
http://www.mydomain.com being spidered………
Cannot connect to Yahoo, you might have used more than 5000 queries today?

anything i should check…its a new api key

PPClab   March 29, 2008 5:38 am | Reply

Yahoo is quite unreliable, try again later. If that fails then send me an email and I will take a look.

 
 

I’m having problems too. It says 0 links for all the sites I’ve added and also the PR column is missing. When I click the refresh link on the individual links within a site I get the following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: file_get_contents() in /home/virtual/site25/fst/var/www/html/linkanalysis/update.php on line 21

Any clues??

 

I’ve checked the code and the PR column is not included in the table so it’s not even trying to pull the image. It’s on a shared host running a version of PHP just prior to 5 if that helps.

Del   March 29, 2008 7:59 am | Reply

I will try release a better version next week.

 
 

Patrick, sorry. I have a problem with the tool. I must be doing something wrong. When I go to: http://www.mysite.com/linkanalysis/
I get an error message:
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Access denied for user ‘mydatabasename’@'localhost’ (using password: YES) in /home/user/public_html/linkanalysis/config.inc.php on line 5
Unable to connect to database

Can you please give me any lights on this, I will appreciate it.

SEO Blog   March 29, 2008 8:40 am | Reply

Sounds like you haven’t entered your username and password correctly in the config.inc.php file?

Patrick Altoft   March 29, 2008 9:46 am |

Thanks Patrick, I will check on that, keep up the good work!

 
Reply
 
 

Thanks, Patrick, for the head’s up. This will be a useful addition to the ‘bat belt’ of tools we use.

Take care,
Bill.

 

[…] Link Analysis Tool: The Ultimate Open Source SEO Tool - from BlogStorm. […]

 

I keep getting this error message:

Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Any Ideas

 

Looks like an awesome tool, thanks. Having some issues implementing though - getting a 503 error when trying to add a domain. Could this be a permission problem?

 

Awesome Patrick. Can’t wait to put it to use and see all the future enhancements.

 

hey Patrick, still getting the error, I have not idea if the email i sent you via your contact form when thru or not the page timed out. Thanks

 

[…] Link Analysis Tool : The ultimate open source SEO tool […]

 

Hi Patrick,

It really is a valuable tool, and I look forward to updates to it.

My domains loaded after I got a new API key from Yahoo - don’t know what was wrong the the first one I got. When I reloaded my domains I got the link count from Yahoo.

However, the PageRank is missing from my version as well, same as other people have mentioned above.

I look forward to any upgrades to your tool.

 

Yep, really good tool, I’m gonna install and will head back with comments after a decent trial.

Thanks,

Colin

 

Hi Patrick I have not been able to make it work. I have replaced username, password and database-name in the config.php file as you mentioned, but is not working still. Can you show me a sample of how it has to be done properly? Thanks in advance.

This is whow I replaced it on the file:

$mainconnection =MYSQL_CONNECT(”localhost”,”myuser”,”my password”) OR DIE(”Unable to connect to database”);

@mysql_select_db(”mydatabasename”) or die(”Unable to select the database”);

“and also:”

$yahoo_api_key=”myyahooapikey”;

I don’t know what’s wrong? I keep getting the same error:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Access denied for user ‘mydatabasename’@’localhost’ (using password: YES) in /home/user/public_html/linkanalysis/config.inc.php on line 5
Unable to connect to database

 

Hey Patrick,

Thanks for the tool. Unfortunately, there seems to be no readme file in your zip file and I am getting the following error when I try to add a site:

“Column count doesn’t match value count at row 1″

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

I have the same problem as above. With the last release you must forget to include readme file.

Thanks,

 

Ditto the two above. I’m actually working on fixing this if I can. Hopefully you beat me to it…

Cheers

 

That sounds an awesome tool. Many thanks for sharing

 

Good Piece of work, Definitely going got use it

 

[…] Altoft of BlogStorm has created an open source link analysis tool that does some of the same functions as SEO Quake. Patrick’s tool is not a Firefox extension, […]

 

[…] Link Analysis Tool The tool is currently in Beta and you can download it here. My idea is that by releasing this as an open source project other programmers and skilled people can help me improve the tool based on feature requests and bug reports from the community. Read more here […]

 

I get to know about this tool from vandelaydesign and it’s seems to be a really handy tool to work on. downloading it. Thanks for making it free for distribution. i really appreciate it.

 

[…] calculators to Flash quizzes. Patrick Altoft of BlogStorm launched his SEO blog based off of a link analysis tool that gained huge popularity. In fact, he was able to attain 10,000 links in just 3 […]

 

[…] Altoft of Blogstorm has recently written a Link Analysis Tool "the ultimate open source SEO Tool". It’s a server-based tool that runs on PHP & MySQL. Better still, he released it as […]

 

Hi man
Really great tool, RESPECT.

had a little problem, it doesn’t show pr on pages and some pages wasn’t crawled by bot, why ?

i can show u what is this about if you are interested

thanks

 

Wait for your excellent tool, Love it. Need a new version
for now seem like a little bug to me, Every link show 0 link to each result. How can i do ?
Thanks

Babieintown   May 13, 2008 1:07 pm | Reply

 

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