Is there an API that allows you to find out how many sites link to yours?

Question

I know google has things like linkto:yourdomain.com and Alexa is around, but there's nothing that I can query and get the number of sites that link to me. Anyone know of such a thing, other than using Google or another search engine and scraping the HTML results?

Answer 1

Yahoo! SiteExplorer has an API. I've never used it, but this should give you what you need:

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/siteexplorer/V1/inlinkData.html

Answer 2

You can pull it in from Alexa. For example all sites linking to Yahoo would be:

http://www.alexa.com/data/ds/linksin/yahoo.com?q=link:yahoo.com/

So just replace "yahoo.com" in the 2 spots with your site and it should work. You can then parse the HTML to get any info you want.

Or you can look into Alexa's API : http://www.alexa.com/site/devcorner/web_info_services, but they are not free.

Answer 3

Personally, I would just grab all my HTTP logs. Find the Referer entries, then download each Referer looking for inbound links to your domain/page. This should be a simple task to automate and will give you great and timely results with very little effort.

@cnu: Yes, you are correct. But in mind, if no one uses the link, then it doesn't exist. This is the internet. :-)

Answer 4

@Frank Krueger: It wouldn't work well. What if no one clicked on the link pointing to your page? It means no referrer and it won't show in the logs.

Answer 5

@Frank Kreuger

If no one uses a link, but Google knows it's there, then it certainly does exist :)