You heard.
We’ve added Majestic SEO’s API to the function list of our Links API Extension for Excel.
Woah!
Back in July this year, I spent a full two days analysing the differences between Majestic, Google Webmaster Tools, SEOmoz’s Mozscape, aHrefs and SearchMetrics. All I can say about that experience is that I learned *such* a lot about the way the various tool providers must be crawling and updating their indices. I concluded that it’s wise to have access to GWMT, Mozscape and Majestic data as a bare minimum, and for extra depth, we began using aHrefs at the Plex, too.
You might remember that I asked: “What tool casts the widest net?” Was there such a thing as perfect when it came to a link tool?
Clearly, Google Webmaster Tools reported on the most diverse range of domains but I found that this did not mean GWMT data was a complete picture of a site’s back link profile. In fact I found that none of the tools did. In the study, I took every single root domain reported by each tool and created a master list of 6,755 unique linking root domains pointing to SEOgadget. Of those, 5,682 of them were still live domains. Then I divided the number of reported linking root domains from each tool by the aggregate number to calculate a % of coverage. Obviously this assumed that the aggregated list represented the truly complete list of all domains that link to SEOgadget.
So, that’s why we added Majestic to the Links API Extension. That, and it’s *so* much easier working with their API (once you get used to it).
How to learn the extension
Don’t be put off by this next statement – this is quite advanced tooling, so be prepared to put in some time to learn the basics. One of my newest hires asked exactly this question – “what’s the fastest way to learn these tools?”. My answer is this. You’re working with an API service (or several, actually). All API services have documentation – if you learn the names of the calls, and what they do, you’re a long way towards being able to use them.
The SEOmoz API documentation is really, really good – I’d recommend you start there, being sure to learn the functions available via the extension (URLmetrics, AnchorText, LinksAPI and TopPages). You can learn more about using them with the Links API Extension in this helpful post: http://seogadget.com/mozscape-api-extension-for-excel/ and it really helps to watch a video:
Majestic is slightly more complex, in that there are many more API calls to learn. We’re supporting pretty much all of them, but for the launch we’re leaving the less popular ones undocumented. Don’t worry, there’s some amazing data headed your way, it’s just that these things take a long time to document and I’m still learning some of the 19 (!) API calls myself. For your information, this post covers a feature to download the top back links to your site, get URL metrics, anchor text and history calls. The rest we’ll cover on the blog over time, so make sure you’re following us!
How to install the extension
The installation process hasn’t really changed from last time, with the obvious exception that we’re now getting authorisation via Majestic’s OpenApps interface. Open Apps is pretty simple, as a Silver user (or higher, or a API developer, for that matter), you follow the authorisation URL in the set-up file, allow the tool to use your account (no information during this process including personally identifiable information is passed to SEOgadget, just so you’re clear). Hopefully that’s reasonably clear – here’s how it goes:
Step 1 – Download the file, save and open setup.xlsm
Step 1.5 – uninstall a previous version
If you’ve got a previous version of our app installed, you’ll need to uninstall it first with this button:
Step 2 – Click the “Enable Content” button in Excel
Step 3 – Go and get your API keys
Your SEOmoz API accessID and SecretKey (yes, I know about the typo’s – they’re fun, leave them be!) can be found here: http://seomoz.org/api
To get your Majestic API Token, you’ll need to authorise our application to connect to you account via our OpenApps Authorisation URL – available from inside the set-up file:
It’s pretty simple; just login, approve the application (or upgrade, or register – you need Silver access!), by following this prompt:
Step 4 – Install Add in and test
That’s it – you’ll see your new functions appear if you type “=majestic”, and you’re ready to go!
Here are some copy and paste functions to get you started. Enjoy!
Get data on your back links to a domain, sub-domain or URL
API Documentation: http://developer-support.majesticseo.com/api/commands/get-back-link-data.shtml
Example Query:
=majesticAPI_toFit("GetBackLinkData","fresh","seogadget.co.uk","ShowDomainInfo=1,Count=10")
Get the top 10 links from the fresh index to the root domain, SEOgadget.co.uk
=majesticAPI_toFit("GetBackLinkData","historic","seogadget.co.uk","ShowDomainInfo=1,Count=1000")
Get the top 1000 links from the historic index to the root domain, SEOgadget.co.uk
Get the anchor text links to a domain, sub-domain or URL
API Documentation: http://developer-support.majesticseo.com/api/commands/get-anchor-text.shtml
Example Query:
=majesticAPI_toFit("GetAnchorText","historic","seogadget.co.uk")
Get the top 10 anchors to the domain SEOgadget.co.uk from the historic index
=majesticAPI_toFit("GetAnchorText","fresh","seogadget.co.uk","ShowDomainInfo=1,Count=100")
Get the top 100 anchors to the domain SEOgadget.co.uk from the fresh index
Get URL metrics about a domain, sub-domain or URL
API Documentation: http://developer-support.majesticseo.com/api/commands/get-index-item-info.shtml
Example Query:
=majesticAPI_toFit("GetIndexItemInfo","historic","seogadget.co.uk,distilled.net")
Get Majestic’s URL metrics about SEOgadget.co.uk and Distilled.net
Get the backlink history of a domain
Example Query:
=majesticAPI_toFit("GetBackLinksHistory","historic","seogadget.co.uk",,"item0")
For a single API call (cached) you can request the backlink history for multiple items (domains) like this:
=majesticAPI_toFit("GetBackLinksHistory","historic","seogadget.co.uk,seogadget.com",,"item0")
Where "item0" would be “seogadget.co.uk”‘s backlinks and "item1" would be seogadget.com
Which creates a table that you can make an impressive charts from like this:
It’s a platform, go build on it!
I hope you like our new toy. I think it’s beautiful. Don’t forget that the real power of this extension is the ability to rapidly prototype reports and build really cool stuff like Open Site Explorer for Excel, and combining with SEO Tools for Excel, our Adwords API Extension and SEOgadget’s own Links API (soon to be included in this extension!), you can build some savagely amazing stuff. All you have to do is read the documentation, practice a little and learn.
Get the download
Simply download and extract the zip file and follow the installation instructions above.
Image credit: jurvetson
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