Simple Alexa Rank Retrieval

Many web developers are stumped with the method of retrieving Alexa Ranks. With this simple code, you can get yours within seconds!

<?php
	function getPage ($url) {
		if (function_exists('curl_init')) {
			$ch = curl_init($url);
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
			curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
			return curl_exec($ch);
		} else {
			return file_get_contents($url);
		}
	}
	function getAlexaRank($url) {
		$url = @parse_url($url);
		$url = $url['host'];
		$url = "http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=s&url=$url";
		$data = $this->getPage($url);
		preg_match('#<POPULARITY URL="(.*?)" TEXT="([0-9]+){1,}"/>#si', $data, $p);
		$value = ($p[2]) ? number_format($p[2]) : 0;
		return $value;
	}
?>

PHP:

To call the function, simply enter this code, but with your desired website:

<?php
	echo getAlexaRank ('http://www.google.com');
?>

PHP:

Comments and rep appreciated. Have a nice day

 

nice one..

 

Five star post, thanks

 

very nice i was thinking how to do it . Thanks

 

Awesome!!

Gr8 post!! Lucky to be here, between u guyz

 

Oh my goodness... deffo decent!! Rated you !

 

Thanks everyone, appreciate the comments

Took me a while to figure it out as well, figured I'd share

 

I get:
Fatal error: Using $this when not in object context in C:\Program Files\xampp\htdocs\alexa.php on line 17

lemme check to see if cURL is enabled

 

oooo I got that too, when I tried it on my host and also on localhost ... :/

 

Whoops, please change

$data = $this->getPage($url);

PHP:

to

$data = getPage($url);

PHP:

Sorry for the trouble

 

with thanks to nico_swd (i think that's his username)
I am using:

<?php
$url = google.com;
$xml = file_get_contents('http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=s&url=$url');
preg_match('/TEXT="([\d]+)"\/>/i', $xml, $match);
echo $match[1];
?>

Code (markup):

does not require cURL and it is fast

 

I wonder what:

<REACH RANK="2"/>

Code (markup):

is for?

 

I ran a simple benchmark test, and mine returned on average about .01 seconds faster

 

Another simple method which i used on a few projects of mine was like this -

$sitename="www.xxxx.com";
$content = strip_tags (file_get_contents ('http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url='.$sitename));
$content = str_replace(' Traffic Rank','xxx',$content);
$content = str_replace('Explore this site','xxx',$content);
$content = explode('xxx', $content);
$var=trim($content[1]);
$pieces = explode(" ", $var);
$alexa=$pieces[1];
$alexa=str_replace(',','',$alexa);
$alexa=$alexa+1-1;

PHP:

$alexa is the alexa rank of $sitename...

that was easy huh

 

Yay, this one works. +1

 

@softcloud? did mine not work?
hmm works on localhost for me, I am on PHP5

 

The only problem might be that file_get_contents is not allowed by some hosting companies like dreamhost.

Also such things make a site very slow especially if you have them on all pages. The similar method can be used to calculate backlinks pointing to a site as in MSN And Yahoo

To count the number of backlinks in MSN we type "link:www.xxxx.com" .In PHP we can do it same way like this -

$sitename="www.xxxx.com";
$content = strip_tags (file_get_contents ('http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=link%3A'.$sitename));
$content = str_replace('Page 1 of ','xxx',$content);
$content = str_replace(' results'.$sitename.'','xxx',$content);
$content = explode('xxx', $content);
$var=trim($content[1]);
$pieces = explode(" ", $var);
$msnbl = $pieces[0];
$msnbl=str_replace(',','',$msnbl);
$msnbl=$msnbl+1-1;

PHP:

And similarly for yahoo

$sitename="www.xxxx.com";
$content = strip_tags (file_get_contents ('http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2F'.$sitename.'&bwm=i&bwmf=a&bwms=p'));
$content = str_replace('Inlinks (','xxx',$content);
$content = str_replace(') Show Inlinks','xxx',$content);
$content = explode('xxx', $content);
$var=trim($content[1]);
$pieces = explode(")", $var);
$yahoobl = $pieces[0];
$yahoobl=str_replace(',','',$yahoobl);
$yahoobl=$yahoobl+1-1;

PHP:

Yes, your method is nice, small and quick. I tried to this using this method earlier but failed since i am not a expert at regular expressions.

regards
aditya

 

Is it not a risk that alexa block a IP when using file_get_contents and it is better to use curl since you can set the browser version ? Just a thought..

 

Nah the file_get_contents thing didn't work mate. My localhost is PHP4 and my host is PHP5.

 

Nice! Works a charm!