Understanding the Inbound Link Explorer API Response - PHP

After receiving the request, the API will give a response back to your web server. The format of the response could be XML (default), JSON or PHP. You can instruct the Yahoo Site Explorer API to give your the desired response format by incorporating this parameter into your request (see example above):

Output=[yourresponseformat eg. PHP, JSON or XML]

A PHP response will be used in this tutorial. Below are the most important response variables and their significance to SEO:

TotalResultsAvailable. This is the total number of back links pointing to the domain or a certain URL in your domain; it depends on what you are requesting. If you have this data, it highly correlates with the website's link popularity.

Title. This is the title of the linking page. By using this data properly, you can measure the relevance of the linking page with respect to your domain. The relevance of the page is one of the most important elements of back links.

URL. This is the URL of the back link page. By using this response, you can use this data to further check the back linking domain, such as the age of the domain, registration, number of indexed pages, Page Rank, etc., which can be used to measure the authority and trust of the back linking domain.

This concludes the first part. In the second part, you will learn how to formulate your PHP script to make requests and receive the response from the Site Explorer API.