We’ve been pretty busy here at AuthorityLabs lately. It’s probably about time we start letting everyone in on some of the cool things we have going on.
Rank Tracking Interface
As many of you know, our old (nearly 3 years now) system has hiccups from time to time. We’ve improved performance on that quite a bit lately and we’ve had good feedback on that. Toward the end of 2011, we started planning and development on an entirely new interface and backend. The new system will result in even more reliability, speed, and eventually a lot of cool new features. We will be looking to migrate some existing accounts to the new system within the next month or so and at that point, all new accounts will be on the new system. Here’s a sneak peek at the new look.
Partner API
Our developers have been working long hours to add new features and engines to our Partner API. Just supplying organic SERP data hasn’t been good enough for us. Our goal is to give our partners everything they need to build their own tools, reporting, and decision making systems.
More Engines and Locales
We now support ALL official versions of Google, Yahoo! and Bing, so those of you who have clients asking for rankings on Google Maldives, you can now provide that data. 😉
We’re also excited to tell you we’ve added Yandex and Baidu to the Partner API which are currently in beta. We tested these pretty extensively and they seem to be working great. Simply send over the engine parameter ‘baidu’ or ‘yandex’ with a keyword and you can start getting data from those. Drop us a note if there’s more you’d like to see parsed out of those SERPs into the JSON version.
Supported Locale API Calls
Our API now has endpoints for you to easily digest and update the locale codes we support. Provided within the response are human readable descriptions along with the URL for the usable version of that engine. These should be very useful for easily updating locales within your app, and easily providing your users human friendly drop-downs.
http://api.authoritylabs.com/supported/google.json
http://api.authoritylabs.com/supported/bing.json
http://api.authoritylabs.com/supported/yahoo.json
http://api.authoritylabs.com/supported/yandex.json
http://api.authoritylabs.com/supported/baidu.json
Google Ads
Several of our partners asked for ad information and we’re now parsing ads out of Google’s search results pages and providing that to you in an easy to parse JSON format. There’s a new section below the ‘serp’ called ‘ads’ which you’ll find JSON formatted Google ads if they appeared on the SERP we were served. Click here for an example.
As part of that ad data, we’re pulling out the destination_url, headline, raw_destination_url, description, ad_location and display_url. We give you both a clean version of the destination URL and the actual one Google’s serving. We’re also giving you the location of the ad found on the page.
Queue Status
The Partner API has an endpoint that allows you to get your account limits and currently hourly usage (api.authoritylabs.com/account/{id}.json). Now included in that is the current hours to deliver on the delayed queue. This is really useful for understanding roughly how full our queues are; specifically, how long you can expect between POSTs to the delayed queue and when results are available. The values in these fields will either be a 6, 12, 18 or 24. When a 12 is returned you can expect results to be available between 6 and 12 hours after you POST. When a 24 is returned you can expect results to be available between 18 and 24 hours after you POST. This should give you a good idea of how busy we are at any given time. We’re also returning this data when you make a successful POST response if you’d like to grab it from that.
We’ve also added a system message within the JSON for account limits and queue status. A lot of you have internal dashboards for various data collection tasks. Now you can easily stay on top of the status of your account and the Partner API as a whole while getting updates from us directly in what you look at daily.
Partner API Tools
One of our goals is to make our data as easy to access as possible. As a result of that, we’ve posted several packages in different languages to help get you going on using the Partner API. Here’s a list of what we have so far:
We’re also working on a basic turnkey tool that can easily be installed on your own server to get you started on the Partner API with pretty much no development time needed. The first one we will roll out is in PHP and should be in beta testing sometime in the next couple weeks. If you’d like to get started on the Partner API and become a beta tester for the new PHP rank tracking tool we’re working on, contact us for more information. If you sign up for an account and get started as a beta tester, we’ll throw some free Partner API usage your way.
Other Cool Stuff
Our partners are constantly rolling out new tools and reporting based off of our API data. Usually those tools are in-house and private. One partner recently decided to take their internal tools and turn them into an app that lets anyone check their rankings. Where I Rank was launched earlier this week and from what we’ve seen, it’s a pretty cool tool for quickly checking rankings on a few keywords without having to wade through pages and pages of SERPs.
If you’ve built some cool tools with our data and would like to have it featured here, shoot us a message and we’ll get on it.
Design Intern
AuthorityLabs is looking for a design intern to help with various design projects we have from time to time. We’ve posted design jobs in quite a few places and hopefully we’ll end up with someone that fits our needs. If you know someone looking to get some experience, please have them submit their resume.
