juust ~ php oddities » trackback http://www.juust.org Link theory and search engine optimization Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:39:32 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 curl trackbacks http://www.juust.org/index.php/curl-trackbacks/2009/03/ http://www.juust.org/index.php/curl-trackbacks/2009/03/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:53:13 +0000 juust http://www.juust.org/?p=375 Continue reading →]]> I figure i’d blog a post on trackback linkbuilding. A trackback is … (post a few and you’ll get it). The trackback protocol isn’t that interesting, but the implementation of it by blog-platforms and cms’es makes it an excellent means for network development, because it uses a simple http-post. cUrl makes that easy).

To post a succesful link proposal I need some basic data :

about my page

  • url (must exist)
  • blog owner (free)
  • blog name (free)

about the other page

  • url (must exist)
  • excerpt (should be proper normal text)

my page : this is preferably a php routine that hacks some text, pictures and video’s, PLR or articles together, with a url rewrite. I prefer using xml textfiles in stead of a database, works faster when you set stuff up.

other page : don’t use “I liked your article so much…”, use text that maches text on target pages, preferably get some proper excerpts from xml-feeds like blogsearch, msn and yahoo (excerpts contain the keywords I searched for, as anchor text it works better for search engine visibility and link value).

Let’s get some stuff from the MSN rss feed :

  1. //a generic query = 5% success
  2. //add "(powered by) wordpress"
  3.       $query=urlencode('keywords+wordpress+trackback');
  4.       $xml = @simplexml_load_file("http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=$query&count=50&first=1&format=rss");
  5.       $count=0;
  6.       foreach($xml->channel->item as $i) {
  7.  
  8.            $count++;
  9.  
  10. //the data from msn
  11.            $target['link'] = (string) $i->link;
  12.            $target['title'] = (string) $i->title;
  13.            $target['excerpt'] = (string) $i->description;
  14.  
  15. //some variables I'll need later on
  16.            $target[id'] = $count;
  17.           $target['trackback'] = '';
  18.           $target['trackback_success'] = 0;
  19.  
  20.           $trackbacks[]=$target;
  21.       }

25% of the cms sites in the top of the search engines are WordPress scripts and WordPress always uses /trackback/ in the rdf-url. I get the source of the urls in the search-feed and grab all link-url’s in it, if any contains /trackback/, I post a trackback to that url and see if it sticks.

(I can also spider all links and check if there is an rdf-segment in the target’s source (*1), but that takes a lot of time, I could also program a curl array and use multicurl, for my purposes this works fast enough).

  1. for($t=0;$t<count ($trackbacks);$t++) {
  2. //I could use curl
  3. //but 95% of the urls offered are kosher and respond fast
  4.      $content = @file_get_contents($trackbacks[$t]['link']);
  5.      preg_match_all ("/a[\s]+[^>]*?href[\s]?=[\s\"\']+".
  6.            "(.*?)[\"\']+.*?>"."([^< ]+|.*?)?<\/a>/",
  7.         $content, &$matches);
  8.  $uri_array = $matches[1];
  9.  foreach($uri_array as $key => $link) {
  10.              if(strpos($link, 'rackbac')>0) {
  11.                 $trackbacks[$t]['trackback'] = $link;
  12.                 break;
  13.              }
  14.         }
  15. }
  16. </count>

When I fire a trackback, the other script will try and assert if my page has a link and matching text. I have to make sure my page shows the excerpts and links, so I stuff all candidates in a cached xml file.

  1. function cache_xml_store($trackbacks, $pagetitle)
  2. {
  3.  $xml = '< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  4. <trackbacks>';
  5.  for($a=0;$a<count ($trackbacks);$a++) {
  6.   $arr = $trackbacks[$a];
  7.   $xml .= '<entry>';
  8.   $xml .= '<id>'.$arr['id'].'</id>';
  9.   $xml .= '<excerpt>'.$arr['excerpt'].'</excerpt>';
  10.   $xml .= '<link>'.$arr['link'].'</link>';
  11.   $xml .= '<title>'.$arr['title'].'</title>';
  12.   $xml .= '';
  13.  }
  14.  $xml .= '</count></trackbacks>';
  15.  
  16.  $fname = 'cache/trackback'.urlencode($pagetitle).'.xml';
  17.  if(file_exists($fname)) unlink('cache/'.$fname);
  18.  $fhandle = fopen($fname, 'w');
  19.  fwrite($fhandle, $xml);
  20.  fclose($fhandle);
  21.  return;
  22. }

I use simplexml to read that cached file and show the excertps and links once the page is requested.

  1. // retrieve the cached xml and return it as array.
  2. function cache_xml_retrieve($pagetitle)
  3. {
  4.  $fname = 'cache/trackback'.urlencode($pagetitle).'.xml';
  5.  if(file_exists($fname)) {
  6.   $xml=@simplexml_load_file($fname);
  7.   if(!$xml) return false;
  8.   foreach($xml->entry as $e) {
  9.    $trackback['id'] =(string) $e->id;
  10.    $trackback['link'] =  rid((string) $e->link);
  11.    $trackback['title'] =  (string) $e->title;
  12.    $trackback['description'] =  (string) $e->description;
  13.  
  14.    $trackbacks[] = $arr;
  15.   }
  16.   return $trackbacks;
  17.  }
  18.  return false;
  19. }

(this setup requires a subdirectory cache set to read/write with chmod 777)

I use http://www.domain.com/financial+trends.html and extract the pagetitle as “financial trends’, which has an xml-file http://www.domain.com/cache/financial+trends.xml. (In my own script I use sef urls with mod_rewrite, you can also use the $_SERVER array).

  1. $pagetitle=preg_replace('/\+/', ' ', htmlentities($_REQUEST['title'], ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8"));
  2.  
  3. $cached_excerpts = cache_xml_retrieve($pagetitle);
  4.  
  5. //do some stuff with, make it look nice  :
  6. for($s=0;$s<count ($cached_excerpts);$s++) {
  7. //this lists the trackback (candidates)
  8.     echo $cached_excerpts[$s]['excerpt'];
  9.     echo '<a href="'.$cached_excerpts[$s]['link'].'">'.$cached_excerpts['title'].'';
  10. }
  11. </count>

Now I prepare the data for the trackback post :

  1. for($t=0;$t<count ($trackbacks);$t++) {
  2.  
  3.     $trackback_url = $trackbacks[$t]['trackback'];
  4. //does it have a trackback target url ? then prepare data :
  5.     if($trackback_url !='') {
  6.         $trackback_data = array(
  7.  "url" => "url of my page with the link to the target",
  8.   "title" => "title of my page",
  9.  "blog_name" => "name of my blog",
  10.  "excerpt" => '[...]'.trim(substr($trackbacks[$t]['description'], 0, 150).'[...]'
  11.         );
  12.         //…and try the trackback
  13.         $trackbacks[$t]['trackback_success'] = trackback_ping($trackback_url, $mytrackbackdata);
  14.     }
  15. }
  16. </count>

This the actual trackback post using cUrl. cUrl has a convenient timeout setting, I use three seconds. If a host does not respond in half a second it’s probably dead. Three seconds is generous.

  1. function trackback_ping($trackback_url, $trackback)
  2.  {
  3.  
  4. //make a string of the data array to post
  5.  foreach($trackback as $key=>$value) $strout[]=$key."=".rawurlencode($value);
  6.         $postfields= implode('&', $strout);
  7.  
  8. //create a curl instance
  9.  $ch = curl_init();
  10.  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $trackback_url);
  11.  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 3);
  12.  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)");
  13.  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
  14.  
  15. //set a custom form header
  16.  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded'));
  17.  
  18.  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
  19.  
  20.         curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
  21.  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postfields);
  22.  
  23.  $content = curl_exec($ch);
  24.  
  25. //if the return has a tag 'error' with as value 0 it went flawless
  26.  $success = 0;
  27.  if(strpos($content, '>0')>0) $success = 1;
  28.  curl_close ($ch);
  29.  unset($ch);
  30.  return $success;
  31.  }

Now the last routine : rewrite the cached xml file with only the successful trackbacks (seo stuff) :

  1. for($t=0;$t<count ($trackbacks);$t++) {
  2.     if($trackbacks[$t]['trackback_success']>0) {
  3.         $store_trackbacks[]=$trackbacks[$t];
  4.     }
  5. }
  6. cache_xml_store($store_trackbacks, $pagetitle);
  7. </count>

voila : a page with only successful trackbacks.

Google (the backrub engine) don’t like sites that use automated link-building methods, other engines (Baidu, MSN, Yahoo) use a more normal link popularity keyword matching algorithm. Trackback linking helps getting you a clear engine profile at relative low cost.

0) for brevity and clarity, the code above is rewritten (taken from a trackback script I am developing on another site), it can contain some typo’s.

*1) If you want to spider links for rdf-segments : TYPO3v4 have some code for easy retrieval of trackback-uri’s :

  1. /**
  2.   * Fetches ping url from the given url
  3.   *
  4.   * @param string $url URL to probe for RDF
  5.   * @return string Ping URL
  6.   */
  7.  protected function getPingURL($url) {
  8.   $pingUrl = '';
  9.   // Get URL content
  10.   $urlContent = t3lib_div::getURL($url);
  11.   if ($urlContent && ($rdfPos = strpos($urlContent, '<rdf :RDF')) !== false) {
  12.    // RDF exists in this content. Get it and parse
  13.    $urlContent = substr($urlContent, $rdfPos);
  14.    if (($endPos = strpos($urlContent, '</rdf:RDF>', $rdfPos)) !== false) {
  15.     // We will use quick regular expression to find ping URL
  16.     $rdfContent = substr($urlContent, $rdfPos, $endPos);
  17.     $pingUrl = preg_replace('/trackback:ping="([^"]+)"/', '\1', $rdfContent);
  18.    }
  19.   }
  20.   return $pingUrl;
  21.  }
  22. </rdf>
]]> http://www.juust.org/index.php/curl-trackbacks/2009/03/feed/ 4 trackbacks http://www.juust.org/index.php/trackbacks/2009/03/ http://www.juust.org/index.php/trackbacks/2009/03/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:51:31 +0000 juust http://www.juust.org/?p=347 Continue reading →]]> Trackbacks are brilliant stuff. I programmed a trackback module into the trends script yesterday just to see what it yields. As long as you don’t use it to spam and stick to common standards, it’s the fastest deep link building method available. I noticed another trends script is also using trackbacks.

GTrends lists an average 600 different searches per day, that makes 200K pages a year. If you put five blog excerpts with a link on a page you have 1000K backlink opportunities a year, automated, if you use trackbacks.

I got 50% success rate in the first tests, so I put it on a cronjob and it seems to level out at 30% successful links. That seemed a bit much, so I checked the PingCrawl plugin Eli (bluehatseo) and joshteam put together for WordPress. They claim a 80% success rate using Eli’s result scraper, I guess 30% is not aberrant.

For trends, I can’t narrow my search down too much. I need the most recent blogs for the trends buzz. Too narrow searches might exclude the recent news and the script would lose it’s usability. Besides, I figure 10% trackbacks would already be more than enough, a few hundred lines of code with a css template for 100K backlinks a year ain’t bad.

I don’t actually have anything to blog about today, so that’s it.

[added 3-3] ****ing brilliant, 65% trackbacks are accepted, increasing traffic, bots come crawling, finally something that works. Now add proxies.

[added 3-3] bozo style “the script got 4 uniques yesterday!”

Can I be honest ? Dude over at seounderworld gave me a vote of confidence on the trends script and I felt embarrased as the demo looks like shit and didn’t do anything. For scraper basics fine, but it lacked seo potential.

So I added some CSS, validated the source, added caching, gzip, rss-feed, sitemap, and the trackback module. It got 300 uniques yesterday and 400 uniques this morning on its first day out, so it performs better now and I don’t feel so embarrassed anymore.

(nice impression of the trends audience by the way)

I’ll add some proxies to prevent bans and some other stuff, once that’s done I’ll refresh the download.

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