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I’m currently developing a project that I have yet to announce here. In the process, I recognized the need to collect Alexa traffic rank data. Amazon.com, the owning company, offers the opportunity to download traffic rank data for a cost. However, I decided I wanted this data for free since it’s displayed on their website anyway.

I searched for PHP scripts to accomplish the task of retrieving the Alexa traffic rank, and the closest thing I could find was a script compiled by Webdigity. I soon found that Alexa implemented a scrambling mechanism meaning that this script could not be used.

I decided to take the bit of code that Webdigity’s script offered, and I made it more robust to work around Alexa’s screen scraping prevention system. The system currently in place simply takes a rank number (e.g. 230,829) and splits the digits up among several SPAN elements. Additionally, several decoy digits are inserted on SPAN elements with a random class name whose class has a “display:none” CSS attribute. The result is a chunk of code that looks something like this:

<span class="c8be">23</span><span class="c2bd">0,</span><span class="cb79">38</span><span class="c65a">89</span><span class="cae7">29</span>2</span>

My Alexa script will retrieve the list of decoy CSS classes. It then compares these to the HTML elements to determine which ones are hidden, and it removes them. All extraneous HTML and non-numeric characters are stripped, and the Alexa traffic rank is returned. Below is an example of how easy this code is to use.

include('class.alexa.php');
$alexa = new Alexa();
$rank = $alexa->getRank('www.matthuggins.com');

Download the Alexa Traffic Rank PHP Script

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