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.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 87 comments… read them below or add one }
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.
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.
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?
I also get this error message appearing in the error log after trying to add a site through addsite.php
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Maybe your host isn’t allowing the connection to Yahoo?
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Are you seeing PR0 or what? Can you post a screenshot?
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Not sure, have you looked in phpmyadmin to see if the databases are set up?
More comments from Patrick AltoftYou 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?
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I’m not sure, never used SpyGlass.
More comments from Patrick AltoftLooking 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.
Hi Patrick, thanks for this great tool. I came to your site from the SEO Book forums, great information there.
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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 AltoftThanks 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
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
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Yahoo is quite unreliable, try again later. If that fails then send me an email and I will take a look.
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Google doesn’t let you see your competitors backlink information.
If you want anchor text try http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/
More comments from Patrick AltoftI’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.
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I will try release a better version next week.
More comments from Patrick AltoftPatrick, 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.
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Sounds like you haven’t entered your username and password correctly in the config.inc.php file?
More comments from Patrick AltoftThanks, Patrick, for the head’s up. This will be a useful addition to the ‘bat belt’ of tools we use.
Take care,
Bill.
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
Thanks Patrick, I will check on that, keep up the good work!
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
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.
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
@ 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
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
nice tool
I am having problems downloading and running it. Is their a phone number I could call? Or could I IM someone?
Everything working well except the pagerank, not showing..any clues? great tool though, thanks Patrick!
Having a problem to run the program, I can download the file but there a problem installing the program. Can anybody help me.
Thnx.
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…
Holla, i’ve got Spider results
Incorrect integer value: ” for column ‘id’ at row 1 anyone can help with this?
thanks for this great tool…
woowwww…. That is a great tool. Thanks for sharing.
Great. Isn’t this handy. Link analysis through plugin. Thx for taking time to script it
Nice nice project just keep it and working on it !
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/
Great Tool
thanks ,this tools is working better than paid tools
Nice tool, working well
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
How to using tools online can increase my pagerank
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!
yeah thats a nice tool. i like it
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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!
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!
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This sounds like a great tool to have for any website. I like that I can check the page rank of any page on any search engine.
More comments from Paid Survey SitesI am downloading the software now, will let you know what I think.
I am hoping you could help me. I have spent the last few months looking for a really simple tool. I was hoping you would know of one that could help me.
I have a list of urls that we have added a link to, we have the anchor text, and we have the links that the anchor text is pointing to.
Every program that I have tried requires that we add a SINGLE DOMAIN and then it verifies that the link is pointing back.
I would like to upload a list of different domains that different links are pointing to.
Thus, I would add a csv containing the link where the url is, the anchor text and the url the link is pointing to and the software would verify that this is correct.
Thanks.
interesting tool, gonna try this!
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Great tool. I was looking for one like this, since I was not satisfied with all others. I will try to install it on my Joomla site. I hope that I will not have any problems.
This is great can’t wait to test it out.
Thanks I’ve found this really useful in my seo analysis
Thanks a million for this tool, looks fantastic and I shall be installing it this afternoon.
Thanks again.
If anyone has tried either Market Samurai or Advanced Web Ranking I’d be very eager to know how you feel about their usefulness and value and also which you think is better.
Nice news,thanks you for this good sharing.
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What will happen when Yahoo Site Explorer is closed by Microsoft Bing ?
nice tool .. anymore updates on the way ? Do you have a twitter account?
WOW, thank you for this,it will help for sure!
thanks, this looks great tool
Thanks for the tip! Looks interesting.
Thanks for such a wonderful tool.. you are always rocking…
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