Retrieve Alexa Traffic Rank

[iamfratty]

Hello All.

I was wondering if anyone could help me with a snippet of code, or maybe a how to. I have a directory site that reviews websites in all sorts of categories. So say I have a category structure as follows:

-Hosting
----Linux
-------BlueHost
-------HostGator
----Windows
-------jodohost
-------Network Solutions

-Main Category
----Sub Category
-------Listings

I need a snippet of php coding that I can put into each listing that will retrieve that listings specific domain Alexa Traffic Rank.

--Review--
Hosting Provider: Blue Host
Score: 80/100
Last Reviewed: June 29,2009
Alexa Traffic Rank: 915

I just need something really simple and plain without any ugly images like the widget provided by Alexa, or all the other free ones out there.

Can anyone help me out?

Thank you

[bradgrafelman]

There's a service you can use to do this - AWIS ("Alexa Web Information Service"). And from the looks of it, it isn't free.

[iamfratty]

Thank you for your reply, but that is for more detailed information about websites. I know you can do what I need for free, but I just do not know how to write a script that would do so.

[jay6390]

Well it's not totally kosher to do it this way (since it's screen scraping technically) but it does work

function alexa ($domain) {
    $alexa_url = 'http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/';
    $url = $alexa_url.$domain;
    $rank = -1;
    $dom = new DOMDocument();
    @$dom->loadHTML(file_get_contents($url));
    $dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
    $meta = $dom->getElementsByTagName('meta');
    foreach($meta as $k=> $v) {
        if($v->getAttribute('name') == 'description') {
            preg_match('/is ranked number ([\d\,]+)/', $v->getAttribute('content'), $out);
            $rank = str_replace(',', '', $out[1]);
            break;
        }
    }
    return $rank;
}

[iamfratty]

Thank you jay6390. How would I use this for say http://google.com?
And what do you mean by not totally kosher? Are you saying it is frowned upon?
Thank you

[halojoy]

Here is a script I wrote.
It will display graphical image of domain traffic rank.
You enter one domain name and get the image from Alexa.com

Domain can be:
microsoft.com
phpbuilder.com
... and such

<?php

function alexa($site, $months=1){

$url = 'http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=t&b=ffffff&r='.$months.'m&u='.$site;
return '<img src="'.$url.'">';

}

?>
<form method="post">
Domain: <input type="text" name="site">
<input type="submit" name="submit">
</form>
<?php

if(isset($_POST['submit'])){

$site= $_POST['site'];
echo alexa($site);

}

?>

[jay6390]

iamfratty;10938195 wrote:

Thank you jay6390. How would I use this for say http://google.com?
And what do you mean by not totally kosher? Are you saying it is frowned upon?
Thank you

Yes it is frowned upon. You can use it with the following

$rank = alexa('google.com');
echo $rank;

[halojoy]

This function works.
It will pull the current traffic rank for a domain.

<?php

function alexa_rank($domain){
	$url = 'http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/'.$domain;
	$data = file_get_contents($url);
	preg_match('#alt="Global" style="margin-bottom:-2px;"/> (\d+)<#', $data, $match);
	return $match[1];
}
///////////

$domain = 'microsoft.com';
$rank = alexa_rank($domain);
echo $domain.' : '.$rank;

?>

[bradgrafelman]

halojoy;10938211 wrote:

This function works.

For now, yes... but what if someone on their web team comes along and decides that "Global" isn't a very descriptive alternate text and changes it?

While jay6390's technique is slightly better in that he used DOM to parse the HTML code and search for a given entity, it's still screen scraping in the end. Whether or not Alexa allows such automated requests in their TOS/AUP/etc. documents is one issue, and ensuring that your "scraping" method won't break if/when the remote page is updated in any way is another.

The above two concerns is the main reason "screen scraping" is generally frowned upon as jay pointed out.