Using the Yahoo Site Explorer Inbound Links API

If you belong to the search engine marketing industry, one of the most important decision making problems can be found in search engine optimization (SEO). You will need to do analysis of both your competitor's and your own web sites. In SEO aimed at Google, one of the most important factors to examine is "back links". Google's search engine algorithm, as well as other related algorithms of other search engines, particularly Yahoo/MSN, relies on the evaluation of back links to determine or measure the authority, relevance and reputation of a certain website.

Thus, gathering and analyzing back link information comprises an important part of search engine optimization analysis processes. By analyzing back link information, a link profile can then be made for a certain website as to whether:

• The client website lacks relevant links while their competitor has enough related links. If this is the case, maybe they should expose their high quality content to targeted readers (with related websites) which in turn will link to their site. 
  
• In terms of link popularity, the client website's total amount of links coming from other domains is low when compared with competitor websites.
  
• Most of the inbound links are coming from spammy domains which do not give substantial reputation points to the client's website. If this is the case, improving the link profile by getting links from related websites may be an effective strategy. 

You can discover whether you're dealing with any of the above problems after performing a thorough back link analysis.

One of the most effective web site APIs (application programming interface) for gathering back link data is Yahoo Site Explorer. The Site Explorer API can be interfaced with a server-side scripting language (such as PHP) to request data from Yahoo, and then, using an authentication method, Yahoo will output results which will be considered raw data to be used in your back link analysis (using a PHP script).

In this two-part tutorial series, we will show you how to use the Yahoo Site Explorer links API with the PHP server-side scripting language to develop web applications that are important to search engine optimization.