Aaron and his friends created another free tool – Link Harvester – for link analysis, that is FAST, open source, obeys the Yahoo TOS (it queries Yahoo) and has some very nice features such as:

• unique linking domains


• it counts the Links To Domain, Links To Homepage and Pages Indexed for a site and from that calculates a Deep Link Ratio ( the Deep Link Percentage – i.e. how many links do NOT go to the index page )


• their IP addresses & unique c block addresses of the links


• links from .gov, .mil, .edu, or .ac.uk domains. Links from these domains
  are likely rated better in authority type algorithms such as Hilltop or TrustRank.


• Link Harvester also bolds and autochecks domains that link from 5 or more
  pages. You can then requery the Yahoo! database and spider deeper than the
  
  1,000 link limit.


• Link Harvester uses the Yahoo! API


• it provides CSV outputs, and is an open source tool. If you are a heavy user or the query limit (5,000 daily requests) is exceeded feel free to host your own copy of Link Harvester on your site. Setup should take under a minute.


• Here is the Marketingfan branded version Link Harvester source code.

  Please note, your host must support DOM XML for PHP to host this tool.

  I have a nice little how-to recompile PHP/Apache for DOMXML on a typical cpanel host, as I needed that some weeks ago already for other Yahoo webservice samples.
  

• the tool also provides links to Wayback Machine and WhoIs Source and Google cache next to each domain

Inspired by the free tools provided, I am in the process of setting up a free hosted version of this at my



Free Hosted Link Harvester Setup

while there are some other places from where you can use the tool as well:

• Stuntdubl has one up here
• Original at LinkHounds

To sum it up, there are several great features in this tool and I encourage everyone to set it up on a private host for fastest queries.

Of course I'll take my free hosted version down if I encounter some abuse or just typical overload of scarce online tools.

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