Link Analysis Tool : The ultimate open source SEO tool

by Patrick Altoft on March 28, 2008

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

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.

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{ 70 comments… read them below or add one }

Stephan Miller 28 Mar 2008 at 6:55 am: Sweet! I can really use that. Not much more I can say.
Jeremy Luebke 28 Mar 2008 at 7:01 am: 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.
PC Forums 28 Mar 2008 at 7:01 am: 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!
azzam 28 Mar 2008 at 7:23 am: Why thats mighty noble of you patrick.
Will take a spin and see if any coding can be applied to improve.

Azzam
ourmonmouth 28 Mar 2008 at 8:27 am: Patrick – this is a seriously useful tool! Thanks for sharing.

Best wishes,

Howie
PPClab 28 Mar 2008 at 2:59 pm: I really appreciate the great tool, I’ll try to contribute to it as much as possible.
yoichi 28 Mar 2008 at 5:48 pm: 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.
Carl-Johan Hunefalk 28 Mar 2008 at 9:14 pm: 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.
Rebecca 28 Mar 2008 at 9:52 pm: Thanks for the great tool Patrick. Can’t wait to get it installed and analysing!
Gemme 28 Mar 2008 at 10:12 pm: 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?
martaay 29 Mar 2008 at 12:39 am: I also get this error message appearing in the error log after trying to add a site through addsite.php
Patrick Altoft 29 Mar 2008 at 12:57 am
Find me on Twitter: Maybe your host isn’t allowing the connection to Yahoo?
More comments from Patrick Altoft
Patrick Altoft 29 Mar 2008 at 12:58 am
Find me on Twitter: Are you seeing PR0 or what? Can you post a screenshot?
More comments from Patrick Altoft
Patrick Altoft 29 Mar 2008 at 12:58 am
Find me on Twitter: Not sure, have you looked in phpmyadmin to see if the databases are set up?
More comments from Patrick Altoft
G 29 Mar 2008 at 3:08 am: 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!)
Cory Sessions 29 Mar 2008 at 3:28 am: 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!
SEO-Alchemist 29 Mar 2008 at 3:42 am: How will your software compare to SEO SpyGlass?
Patrick Altoft 29 Mar 2008 at 3:52 am
Find me on Twitter: I’m not sure, never used SpyGlass.
More comments from Patrick Altoft
Del 29 Mar 2008 at 4:08 am: 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.
SEO Blog 29 Mar 2008 at 4:18 am: Hi Patrick, thanks for this great tool. I came to your site from the SEO Book forums, great information there.
Patrick Altoft 29 Mar 2008 at 4:58 am
Find me on Twitter: Maybe the path to your PageRank images is broken? Can you see in the source code of the page where they are loading from?
More comments from Patrick Altoft
AlainS 29 Mar 2008 at 5:07 am: 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
PPClab 29 Mar 2008 at 5:38 am: 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
Patrick Altoft 29 Mar 2008 at 7:14 am
Find me on Twitter: Yahoo is quite unreliable, try again later. If that fails then send me an email and I will take a look.
More comments from Patrick Altoft
Patrick Altoft 29 Mar 2008 at 7:15 am
Find me on Twitter: Google doesn’t let you see your competitors backlink information.

If you want anchor text try http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/
More comments from Patrick Altoft
Rebecca 29 Mar 2008 at 7:49 am: 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??
Del 29 Mar 2008 at 7:59 am: 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.
Patrick Altoft 29 Mar 2008 at 8:24 am
Find me on Twitter: I will try release a better version next week.
More comments from Patrick Altoft
SEO Blog 29 Mar 2008 at 8:40 am: 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.
Patrick Altoft 29 Mar 2008 at 9:46 am
Find me on Twitter: Sounds like you haven’t entered your username and password correctly in the config.inc.php file?
More comments from Patrick Altoft
Bill 29 Mar 2008 at 9:41 pm: Thanks, Patrick, for the head’s up. This will be a useful addition to the ‘bat belt’ of tools we use.

Take care,
Bill.
Pommy 30 Mar 2008 at 2:21 pm: 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
Luke 30 Mar 2008 at 3:12 pm: 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?
Vertical Measures 30 Mar 2008 at 9:52 pm: Awesome Patrick. Can’t wait to put it to use and see all the future enhancements.
Evan 31 Mar 2008 at 10:46 pm: 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
SEO Blog 01 Apr 2008 at 3:26 pm: Thanks Patrick, I will check on that, keep up the good work!
Carl-Johan Hunefalk 01 Apr 2008 at 9:38 pm: 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.
Colin Gray 02 Apr 2008 at 3:09 pm: Yep, really good tool, I’m gonna install and will head back with comments after a decent trial.

Thanks,

Colin
SEO Blog 02 Apr 2008 at 8:22 pm: 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
Nuno Andrade 03 Apr 2008 at 2:11 am: 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.
Michal 03 Apr 2008 at 10:06 pm: I have the same problem as above. With the last release you must forget to include readme file.

Thanks,
Judd Exley 07 Apr 2008 at 6:16 am: Ditto the two above. I’m actually working on fixing this if I can. Hopefully you beat me to it…

Cheers
Web Design Lincolnshire 09 Apr 2008 at 3:03 pm: That sounds an awesome tool. Many thanks for sharing
Ash 14 Apr 2008 at 11:27 pm: Good Piece of work, Definitely going got use it
arin2u 20 Apr 2008 at 9:44 am: 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.
Vlad 09 May 2008 at 3:15 pm: 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
Babieintown 13 May 2008 at 1:07 pm: 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
Darlehen 01 Jun 2008 at 12:13 am: @ yoichi

I had the same, login into phpmyadmin and check all rights. That was my bottleneck

BTW. I love the tool now, as it is up and running
TzuVelli 28 Jul 2008 at 6:45 pm: Hey Patrick,

Great tool! Unfortunately, I do not have a ReadMe file so I am not exactly sure how to install it. Sure would love to gt that ReadMe file or a pointer to installation directions.

Beau
vasea 06 Aug 2008 at 10:35 am: nice tool
David 11 Aug 2008 at 11:32 pm: I am having problems downloading and running it. Is their a phone number I could call? Or could I IM someone?
omar 16 Aug 2008 at 11:41 pm: Everything working well except the pagerank, not showing..any clues? great tool though, thanks Patrick!
Leon 04 Oct 2008 at 10:57 pm: Having a problem to run the program, I can download the file but there a problem installing the program. Can anybody help me.
Thnx.
Tampa SEO Consultant 02 Nov 2008 at 3:06 am: Still no readme file? Is this project dead? It looks really promising and I was hoping to add it as a backend tool to me site…
umx 16 Nov 2008 at 2:18 am: Holla, i’ve got Spider results
Incorrect integer value: ” for column ‘id’ at row 1 anyone can help with this?
widarta 21 Nov 2008 at 8:21 pm: thanks for this great tool…
izle 02 Dec 2008 at 4:46 am: woowwww…. That is a great tool. Thanks for sharing.
ShriNagesh 19 Dec 2008 at 12:00 pm: Great. Isn’t this handy. Link analysis through plugin. Thx for taking time to script it
Urban 24 Dec 2008 at 4:57 pm: Nice nice project just keep it and working on it !
visiblenet 15 Jan 2009 at 8:35 pm: This tool seems really useful. Many of the features mentioned are highly sought out by webmasters and SEOs. Link data can be so important, many people aren’t even aware of how to use this type of data. We use a combination of in-house tools we developed, which are now offered on our company site for free. Thought maybe readers here may be interested in trying them out. We encourage feedback, so please let us know if you think improvements can be made.

http://www.visible.net/tools/analyzer/
http://www.visible.net/tools/statistics/
Search24online SEO Services 27 Jan 2009 at 11:15 pm: Great Tool
riya 21 Feb 2009 at 6:45 pm: thanks ,this tools is working better than paid tools
SEO Sydney 22 Feb 2009 at 9:30 am: Nice tool, working well
Poly SEO 28 Feb 2009 at 8:25 pm: Patrick,
Thanks for sharing, much appreciated!
It does not look like visible is going to offer their source code, none the less they seem have some helpful tools.
-Nick
Sanip 01 Mar 2009 at 4:11 pm: How to using tools online can increase my pagerank
Backlinking Software 01 Mar 2009 at 8:14 pm: Thanks for this great piece of software. I have used it a couple of times and it has returned some interesting results encompassing Yahoo’s index. The bones of the software are here and following some further updates (which I understand you and others are working on) this is sure to be a leading backlinking analysis tool – keep up the great work please!
novalja zrce 28 Apr 2009 at 9:14 pm: yeah thats a nice tool. i like it
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Laura Godfrey 15 Jun 2009 at 6:45 pm: This is a great tool. Trying to figure where your back links have come from is extremely difficult and a lengthy process. This application allows you to see the page rank, how many links are present and what search engines it is featured in. In terms of seo, this is very useful and allows you to keep control over your outgoing links and also see your competitors links. Great post!
SEO Rocks! 25 Jun 2009 at 10:39 pm: Thanks for providing this great tool. We are in the middle of a major overhaul, and we would love to use this and link back to you for providing it. Thanks!