The Chatterbox

Common Links Update

As you may have noticed, the Common Links tool was been down for maintenance the last few days. Thankfully Ed sent me a note last weekend to let me know it was returning gobbly-gook, so I took it offline to bring it up to date with the way Yahoo's API works these days, as compared to how they did things when the tool was originally released a few years ago.

Thanks for the heads up Ed !

While I had the tool down to bring it up to date, I decided to do a total rewrite of the back end code, adding a couple of features that had been requested. No time like the present, as they say.

So the tool still does the same basic thing. It allows you to enter a keyword phrase that it then uses to grab the Top 10 ranked sites for said phrase on whichever of the three major search engines you choose to query. It then uses Yahoo's API to grab backlink data for each of these top ranking sites, sorting and ordering it so that you can see which other sites link to two or more of the top ranking sites.

The idea being to give you a heads up regarding some sites you may want to approach to obtain links to your site. Hopefully links from sites that are already considered to be trusted and authoritative by the search engines.

The concept is pretty simple actually. Gathering, ordering and sorting all of the data is a bit more complicated. Almost impossible to do by hand in fact. Hence the reason I built the Common Links tool in the first place.

New additionals to this updated version of Common Links include:

1. The ability to manually insert your own site into the results table, even if it doesn't currently rank in the Top 10 on a certain engine. This feature was requested and I decided to add it into the mix since it can give you a quick visual reference to how your site stacks up against the top ranking sites.

The format you use when entering an Additional Site isn't all that important since I've added some checking into the back end code. You can use the http:// address, the www.domain.com address or even the hostname like domain.com. The tool will handle all of the above.

The tool also automatically checks for duplicate entries, which for the purposes of the tool means the same domain name. So if there are two listings for two pages of the same domain, the tool will automatically strip out the dupe and show the domain only one time. This applies for Additional Sites too. If you manually enter your site and it's already in the Top 10, it'll still only show up once.

Also, it's important to remember Additional Sites will always show up in position #1 in the tool. For our purposes the numbers aren't really the ranking of the sites, though it is if you do not enter an Additional Site. For the tool the numbers are used simply as a reference, not the ranking.

2. I've also added the ability to select whether you want the tool to report on backlinks to the specific page that ranks well, or show every link to the domain regardless of which page it links to. Personally I find the Domain choice gives me a lot better information, but a couple of people have asked for the ability to check backlinks to a specific page. So it's there now.

A couple of notable things to remember...

Sometimes you'll have a phrase that says only 8 or 9 sites were returned as being Top 10 sites. This happens because of the automatic pruning of dupes I mentioned above. Meaning if a certain keyword phrase in a certain search engine has two pages from one site showing in one of those indented listings, it's only going to show up once in the tool. This is done to eliminate needless queries for backlink data for the same domain multiple times.

Also, remember that this tool uses API licenses with each of the three major engines to gather its information. I've always been of the mind that it's a good thing to be a responsible Netizen, so I won't do any scraping, search engine or otherwise. A potential downside to this stance is that occasionally one or the other API licenses will max out its daily usage limits as set by the search engines. For Google that's 1,000 per day, for Yahoo and MSN/Live it's considerably more. And of course they Yahoo API gets a lot more use in this tool because that's the API that does most of the heavy lifting.

So if you get an Error, especially a 403 error, it typically means my license for a particular engine has hit its limit for the day. If you simply wait a day these issues should correct themselves.

I don't regularly monitor the use of this or other API tools I've developed, so I don't see when this happens 9 times out of 10. If you run into a problem where day after day you can't get the tool to work for you, let me know and I'll look into it. If I find someone abusing the free tool with automatic queries or overuse I'll simply cut off their access so they don't adversely affect anybody else.

That's it! Enjoy the new tool.

You can ping this entry by using http://www.randycullom.com/chatterbox/mt-tb.cgi/43 .

I like the change how you can now do choose to analyze page links instead of domain links.