Page Inlink Analyzer: Look at the Pages that Link to Your Site and Their Relative “Link Value”
One of my favorite Yahoo APIs is the Site Explorer API. Site Explorer gives you an insight into one of the core pieces of metadata about your site: the number of inbound links on the web to each of your site’s pages. I’ve always wanted a more powerful interface for exploring that data — including the ability to see the top pages for a site, who’s linking to those pages, and how valuable (in link terms) each of the inbound links is.
The Page Inlink Analyzer provides a first stab at that interface. It gives you the top 35 or so pages for a site on the left, and for each inbound link you get a report of how many inbound links that page has (for the page itself and for its top-level domain) and how many times the page has been bookmarked in Delicous.
Site Explorer doesn’t provide grid-style information in this way. Its API just gives you a single page and its inlink data. The Page Inlink Analyzer takes the inlink data and does the research for you on each of the inlinks you’re looking at to give you insights about their relative value. Because each data point is a separate Site Explorer lookup, I’ve throttled the lookup process to be as civilized as possible with respect to the API’s backend. Be patient — the data does load eventually. Look down the left for information about pages on the current site; look on the right for inlinks to the current site and information about the inlinks.
This is a quick hack at this point and it has some bugs, but it’s a unique way of getting at the hidden insights that Site Explorer can express about your site and it’s place in the information web.
Hey, that’s a very cool hack/layer on top of site explorer.
Thanks, Praveen. There’s still some work to do to make it faster and more intuitive, but it’s definitely a nicer way (from my perspective) to leverage the Site Explorer’s data and get insights from it.
Very interesting use of Site Explorer’s API. Would it be faster if the delicious data was on a separate page? They are not really related so it could be on a separate page maybe? Also, an idea, it would be great to be able to sort the results according to the inlink counts.
That’s pretty cool. My feature request: make the column headers clickable so that I can sort by most links, bookmarks, etc.
Nice app…puts my link analysing programs to shame
Really like this tool – it has been a great help to me so far. Maybe I’m missing something, but is there an easy way to download all results to excel?
@Darren — It’s possible to do that for a single page once all the data is downloaded for that page — but not for the whole dataset. Site Explorer doesn’t give us this data without separate lookups for each inbound link or page, and there’s no way to sort in Site Explorer. That’s why I’ve left the headers unsortable at present. Regards, Eric
@Mark – No — but that’s a great idea. I’ve put it on the to-do list (export to CSV). I’ll try to work that in when I get a chance. Regards, Eric
Cool – thanks Eric. CSV export would be perfect.
Any news on the export to csv? ;)
Nicole — No, no news yet. I’m increasingly of the opinion that the inlink data (even as organized by this tool) will be just a curiosity unless we can do something more compelling with it. It’s possible to do that on the client, as this tool does, but definitely not optimal, because it’s such a slow process to look up stats on every inbound link. I’m interested to see if we can get the Site Explorer team to upgrade the API and make some of this tool’s functionality redundant. All of that said, I do intend to add CSV support of some kind as soon as I have time. -Eric
Great tool, a way to export the data would be great ;-)
I don’t like that anyone can get info about my site so easily, so I had to forbid indexing it by yahoo in robots.txt…
@phpdev,
Interesting choice — I’m not sure I would make the same one, though. This information is still in the web and therefore intrinsically public. Lots of research tools will provide metrics on your site. You’re shutting your site off to 20% of the web-searching public…and to what end?
-Eric
I’ve tried various free and paid tools and only just came across this. I have been playing around with this but it seems a bit slow at the moment.
@April,
Slow is pretty normal for this tool, which looks up data for each cell in the table. However, I would say overall that I’ve been disappointed with how often the backend service providing the data is simply down and unavailable.
Right at the moment, it’s behaving normally for me, but I’m behind the firewall at Yahoo and that could make it somewhat faster for me than it is for you.
-Eric
This tool looks pretty cool to me. Thanks again
Actually, this is one of the better tools to analyze your links and links of your competitor. It is wise though to know how to do it and what info you can obtain from using this nice little app.
Looks good, I prefer SEO Quake for FireFox though.
Eric,
Looks like this tool is extremely powerful, I tried it but it didn’t work, There are several desktop applications that do the same and more, like webcompanalyzer.
Guys, this one of the most important part of your research, a must do, if this tool works then use it, I personally do not like the seo quake plugin.
Regards,
-Suzan
Suzan,
It’s working for me at present, but your note highlights a big omission in the current iteration of the tool: I didn’t add any support in the interface for determining when the Yahoo Site Search web service was having problems or not responding for whatever reason. The tool fails silently when the web service is down, and that’s not an inconsiderable percentage of the time.
Yahoo has overhauled its search web services, so this legacy service may not be around for that much longer. I’m looking into the feasibility of using the new service.
-Eric
Hi,
I typed a URL into this tool and it said there were about 8,000 links. Then I typed the same URL into Yahoo Site Explorer and it said there were about 54,000 links. I’m sure there’s a good reason for the difference. I just don’t know what it is. Will you fill me in? Thanks.
@AlexG
I also use SEO Quake for my firefox browser. It helped me a lot.
Seems like a powerful way to analyze backlinks. For me, SEO is just all about backlinks. The trick is where to get those links which are powerful enough to give a page that big push upwards. Thanks for sharing this. I will definitely be using this utility.
Greg were you looking at internal or external links ?
This is pretty cool. Does it do anything better than the SEO Quake, which seems really good because it happens in the actual search listings?
@Mattress reviews–
It’s not a replacement for SEO Quake — just a different way of slicing and displaying the information, with a particular emphasis on inlinks related to pages on your own site.
-Eric
This is great! For SEO purposes, knowing the number of backlinks is not enough. The quality matters as well and your tool is a proxy for how good these backlinks are. Thanks much!
The knowldge of quality of links as well as quantity of links is key.
I now used this tool as my primary weapon for analyzing any site’s backlinks. The fact that it is free makes it even cooler!
This is a great tool and very beneficial for those SEO. I know a lot of people there who are looking for a good backlinks analyzer, and I am glad I stumbled into one. This is going to be very useful tool for my blog and other websites.
I typed a URL into this tool and it said there were about 8,000 links. Then I typed the same URL into Yahoo Site Explorer and it said there were about 54,000 links. I’m sure there’s a good reason for the difference. I just don’t know what it is.
SEO is an excellent utility. Besides, Firefox extension SEO Quake also shows good results.
SEO is the best!! although I am still educating my self about it but it’s fun! :)
Cool ! Great tool for SEO.
Thanks.
Thank you, this SEO tool is awesome
@David Stuart
Yes I was thinking the exact same thought.
completely true that yahoo is a great engine for checking your backlinks (and a little more) as it seems more accurate than others when it comes to Inlinks…anyway i do check my site’s status with this online tool: http://ministatus.com … maybe it’ll help someone
Excellent tool!!! Of course it has bugs but those can be ignored, given the unique perspective it adds to SEO. Keep up the good work Eric. Thank You.
Awesome Tool. I prefer it to backlink watch
Regards,
John
typed a URL into this tool and it said there were about 8,000 links. Then I typed the same URL into Yahoo Site Explorer and it said there were about 54,000 links. I’m sure there’s a good reason for the difference. I just don’t know what it is. Will you fill me in? Thanks.
Valador, No, I don’t know why that would be — but the underlying answer is that the tool uses Yahoo!’s inlinking webservice, so what you’re describing implies that the web interface and the webservice API return different result. -Eric