Php Class to Retrieve Alexa Rank

By admin in api, parsing 11 Comments

Alexa is a service acquired by Amazon which offers a web traffic report for websites. They retrieve the data from toolbar that can be installed in different browsers, centralize the data and display reports to anyone. The most important indicator is the Alexa Rank. It represents the rank of a webpage in a list of all the websites. It’s not the 100% accurate but it gives a good indication.

Alexa does not offer any free API to obtain Alexa Rank. However there is a simple method to obtain it in the same way the Alexa Toolbar does. All you have to do is to invoke the following url(replacing php-html.net with your domain): http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=s&url=php-html.net

The response should look like this one:

All we have to do is to take the response and extract the Alexa Rank from it. There are various options, we are just going to use a simple regular expression:

class AlexaRank
{
	public function getRequestUri($domain)
	{
		return 'http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=s&url=' . $domain;
	}

	public function parse( $httpResponse )
	{
		preg_match( '##si', $httpResponse, $p );
		$res = ( $p[2] ) ? number_format( intval($p[2]) ):0;
		
		return str_replace(',', '', $res);
	}
}

Then we can simply get the alexa rank:

echo $extractor->parse(file_get_contents($extractor->getRequestUri('php-html.net')));

The extractor class contains the 2 functions one to build the url to be invoked for a domain and the second one to parse the response. This solution was chosen offer the option to use an external function that retrieve the response content. This is because for some hosting servers the file_get_contents does not work, for other curl does not work…

Remember the “use it but not abuse it” concept. Alexa didn’t expose this through a public api for some reason. If you use this function zillions times a day you will probably be detected and have the ip banned.

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11 Comments

  1. Really? You’ve got an XML response and you’re going to parse it with … regular expressions. I believe you should be using the xPath to get the value.

  2. cool idea, unfortunately the alexa link doesnt work anymore.

    I agree with mathew that there are far better/faster ways of parsing this data
    one would be simply to load the response string into a xml php object

  3. Thanks for your code. I have tried but I did not get result. Could you please send / post full source code.

  4. Try this:

    Change :
    preg_match( ‘##si’, $httpResponse, $p );
    To :
    preg_match( ‘##si’, $httpResponse, $p );

    And then:
    $extractor = new AlexaRank();
    echo $extractor->parse(file_get_contents($extractor->getRequestUri(‘php-html.net’)));

  5. Way more simple :

    <?php
    function AlexaRank( $url )
    {
    preg_match( '##si’, file_get_contents(‘http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=s&url=’ . $url), $p );
    return ( $p[2] ) ? number_format( intval($p[2]) ):0;
    }

    echo AlexaRank(‘friendly-froggy.net’);

    ?>

  7. Hi,
    I wonder if you could let me know. How to find similar domain according to alexa from my database.??

    like if I have http://www.freewebstat.info/php-html.net rank 353,373 now my similar domains mean nearest alexa rank to abcoder.

    like
    php-html1.net – 353,370
    php-html2.net – 353,371
    php-html3.net – 353,372
    php-html4.net – 353,374
    php-html5.net – 353,375
    php-html6.net – 353,376

    I wanna print only domain name. if you could help me please.. with phpcode. thank you

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