How to verify a reciprocal link

larryhead

I have a huge database of URLs and need to search each URL for the following HTML tag: <a href="http://www.mysite.com/">

In other words, I need to verify that there is a link to my site on each of the URLs in my database (this is for a links list I'm writing).

Is there some way to load a URL's HTML code into a PHP variable and then search that code for my reciprocal link (using reg expressions or something)? Or perhaps a better way?

I have found absolutely no info anywhere on how to do this, and would be really grateful if someone could help me out.

Thanks in advance,

NYSiRacer

So you want to do an exact phrase search... is that what you mean? If it is, you can get the result from MySQL like this:
(Assume you use MySQL)

$link = '<a href="http://www.mysite.com/">';
"select * from $table where field = '$link'";

This will return everything that match <a href="http://www.mysite.com/"> from the column field

sarahk

You might need to convert a script to do this but the scripts at http://resma.hey.nu/?id_category=83 seem interesting.

sarahk

Oh, yeah, I'm assuming that you'll run this as an admin function because otherwise it'll run slowly.

so, you open the admin page for mysite.com
the page gets a list of each of the links in your mysql database
the script then gets the root url of the link eg theirsite.com
the script then searches theirsite.com for the string "mysite.com"
if found the link is marked as "verified" otherwise is flagged for your attention.

It would be up to you how often you ran the script.

larryhead

NYSiRacer... I really wish it was that simple.

My MySQL db only has the URL of the site (not the site's actual HTML code). So I can query the db, and get a huge list of URL's like:

http://www.domain12.com/a.htm
http://www.domain32.com/b.htm
http://www.domain65.com/c.htm
...

But that is the only info I have stored in my db.

Then I need like a 'spider/bot' to visit each of those URL's, scan the HTML source code of each URL, and tell me if the exact tag
<a href="http://www.mysite.com/">
appears anywhere within that HTML code.

Each of these URL's is supposed to have a link on it to www.mysite.com, and I want to check that it's there.

Is there a way to say in PHP, "go to http://www.domain123.com/ and tell me if there is a link to http://www.mysite.com/ on it"?

larryhead

sarahk,
yea that's exactly what i'm trying to do... if there is only a way to say in PHP, "give me the HTML source code of this URL", and then examine the code in PHP. is this possible?

will check out that link you posted, thanks.

(also, this will only be run 1/week by admin, since there's ~1000 URLs to process)

NYSiRacer

Try this:

<?
$myfile = file("http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=10214923");
foreach ($myfile as $row=>$data) {
	if (preg_match("/http:\\/\\/www.mysite\\.com/i",$data)) {
	echo "Found <b>http://www.mysite.com</b> on line ".$row."<br />";
	}
}
?>

tomkleijkers

Please let me know if the above worked! I'm interested!

larryhead

NYSiRacer,

your posted code worked perfectly... i'm still a bit shocked at how short/elegant it is.
you have no idea how long i've been struggling with this..

thank you very much!!

NYSiRacer

🙂 🙂 🙂