New Tool for Checking Links to your Blog Posts

I’ve just received an email from my friend Patrick telling me about a new tool he’s written (well knowing Pat he probably got somebody else to write it) and it’s so cool I’ve had to break our one post a day tradition and share it straight away.

The tool is called Blog Storm and it tracks how many links your blog posts attract. That way you can see which of your posts are getting the most attention (or not). It produces a league table of your posts and a couple of pretty charts. You can see the stats of our recent posts over here, or the graph below.


Signing up for your own Blog Storm account is free, you’ll need to upload a small script to your site and as it uses the Yahoo API you’ll need to get yourself a key (also free).

To go with the tool, there is also the mandatory web tool blog, first impressions of which are really promising, I’ve already learnt a fair bit from the post, tracking your RSS subscribers in Google Analytics.

I reckon Patrick has come up with a winning tool here and I must admit I do have the feeling of “Why didn’t I think of that”, nice job.

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. Thanks for the write up Al. This time I did actually write all the code myself :)

    If anybody has any feedback or problems using the site please post here.

    We will be blogging about lots of cool internet marketing stuff on the blog as well as tracking everybody’s links.

  2. Cool script. I just signed up to see what it’s all about.

  3. Nice work Patrick, it would be nice if in the backlink numbers it would only count one site once rather than multiple links from one site to give a clearer analysis but I don;t know if that is possible, everyone loves graphs and stats though!

    • The data is from Yahoo so I’m afraid it isn’t possible to only count links once per site.

      I did think about storing all the data about the links on our own database but that isn’t really feasible at this stage - it would mean re-creating the Yahoo search index pretty much.

      • Could you not just filter and store the count or am I over simplifying way too much.

      • If we were to try and filter we would need to loop through all the Yahoo link data (which can be 300,000 results +) and then remove any duplicate sites.

        Since each set of 10 results would use up a single API query its not really practical to do it. A post with 10,000 links would use up 1000 queries every time we checked it, which is about once per day.

        With 8,000 posts already in our database after day 1 we need to keep the number of queries as low as possible as you can imagine.

  4. Won’t this tools be just like Technorati’s incoming links? (show in the wordpress dashboard)

    • The reason I created the tool is because Technorati doesn’t offer the same functionality or charts.

      Clicking on the charts offers the ability to drill down into the data in a way that Technorati will never offer.

      The link data provided by Yahoo is far more in depth than Technorati as Yahoo tracks the entire Internet, rather than just blogs.

      If you check a site like http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/tracker/marketingpilgrim.com/ you will see that Technorati really doesn’t offer the same data.

  5. I have to admit the charts don’t really excite me, but the tip about tracking outgoing links through GA is very helpful.

  6. Thanks For refering us to this tool I can see a loto use for it thanks

  7. Can’t I get all this information from my Google Analytics account? What are they offering that is different, or have I missed something?

    - Martin Reed

    • Hi Martin,

      If you check the stats for a blog like TechCrunch you will see that the charts show each blog post as a spike on the graph. Google Analytics reports the traffic to the site and doesn’t include any link data.

      http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/tracker/techcrunch.com/

      By offering an easy way for bloggers to see which of their posts are most popular we hope to help our users improve their earnings and build stronger blogs.

  8. Seems like an interesting script.

  9. I have a new blog but have so far only written 7 posts (albeit lengthy posts).
    I am now working on driving traffic to it - I get quite a bit but very few comments are left. Any way to give it a quick boost? Or is it just a case of being patient?

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