Another way of checking inbound links to your blog

Written by Kevin Muldoon from System0 on June 8, 2007

A brand new stats tracker was launched yesterday by Patrick Altoft. The site is called BlogStorm and the service allows you to track the number of blogs which link to you using link data from Yahoo.

To be able to retrieve the data you need to get an API key from Yahoo and then add the key to the following file :

<?php


$url=$_GET[”url”];

/*

1. Replace the xxxxxxxxx below with your Yahoo API Key, available at:

https://developer.yahoo.com/wsregapp/index.php
2. Upload the script to your server.
3. Rename the file as a php file such as script.php rather than a txt file
4. Visit http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/add.php and submit your details.

*/

$yahooapikey=”xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”;
$request = ‘http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/inlinkData?appid=’;

$request.=$yahooapikey;

$request.=’&query=’;

$request.=$url;

$request.=’&output=php’;

$request.=’&omit_inlinks=domain’;

$output = unserialize(file_get_contents($request));

$incoming_links=$output[ResultSet][totalResultsAvailable];
echo”$incoming_links”;

?>

After uploading the file you need to add your site to BlogStorm’s tracker. When you have completed this, BlogStorm then generates two graphs for you showing you the number of links to your blog. Here are the first graph that it generated for BloggingTips.com :

It only takes a few minutes to get your API key and submit your site to the tracker so i’d recommend using BlogStorm. Although Technorati will also show incoming links to your latest posts, BlogStorm displays this information much better with links to each post seperately instead of just the latest links in chronological order (which is what Technorati does).

Written by Kevin Muldoon from System0 on June 8, 2007 | Filed Under Blogging

4 Responses so far | Have Your Say!

Jonathan Street | June 8th, 2007 at 11:32 am #

I’m confused as to why you need to get your own API key. The last I knew, admittedly this was a few months ago, is that Yahoo and Microsoft limited access to their API using the IP and not the API key. One API key could perform millions of queries as long as no one IP address submitted more than 2000 a day.

Has this all changed?
shypys | June 8th, 2007 at 2:52 pm #

I dont understand the graph there. It’s obviously messed up but… Ah well, nevermind.

Currently I’m very happy with Technorati and G-Analytics.
Kevin | June 8th, 2007 at 6:31 pm #

Jonathan - im not sure why the api key is needed
shypys - it shows the number of links back to posts on a given day on bloggingtips