The SEO's Guide to Scraping Everything

the SEO’s guide to: !SCRAPING!EVERYTHING! @eppievojt! digital marketing consultant, JPL!

NEXT LEVEL!XPATH-ING! Use Case 1: Does site x link to any page on eppie.net?

NEXT LEVEL!XPATH-ING! Scrape partial What we know:" matches using 1)  Link will contain" http://www.eppie.net in the " XPath’s “contains” href attribute" function to ﬁnd 2)  Some people like to hurt the internet inexact data. by capitalizing URLs, so we’ll need to account for that" 3)  People who link to you don’t care about your desire for canonicalization

DO YOU LINK!TO ME?! //a[contains(@href,http://www.eppie.net’)] PROBLEM: FAILS TO ACCOUNT FOR CASE SENSITIVITY

Add translate() to normalize case//a[contains(translate(@href, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ,abcdefghijklmno pqrstuvwxyz),http://www.eppie.net’)] DO YOU LINK! TO ME?!

How you can use this:Get notiﬁed when a link is removed+ Make contact to potentially save dropping link (friendly reminder, buy expiring domain, recreate dead resource)Integrate into link outreach process+ Get notiﬁcation when link goes live DO YOU LINK! TO ME?!

NEXT LEVEL!XPATH-ING! Use Case 2: Find every external link from cnn.com

NEXT LEVEL!XPATH-ING! What we know:" Combine attribute selectors to more 1)  External links all contain http://" accurately target 2)  Internal links can also use http://" useful information 3)  So we need to exclude http:// links to the current domain

SCRAPE ALL!EXTERNAL LINKS! //a[contains(@href,http://) and not (contains(@href,cnn.com))]

How you can use this:Identify if a page is too spammed out to bother with by pulling external link countsFind expired or expiring domains being linked to from authority sites. Purchase and rebuild or redirect those sites.Broken link building automation SCRAPE ALL! EXTERNAL LINKS!

LINK TYPE!IDENTIFICATION! Use Case 3: How are they ranking? What kind of links do they have?

LINK TYPE!IDENTIFICATION! XPath’s ancestor What we know:" axis lets us A link inside a containing element with leverage semantic an id or class name including the word “comment,” “footer,” or “blogroll” is markup to ID link highly suggestive of type types.

LINK TYPE!IDENTIFICATION! "//a[@href=h,p://randﬁshkin.com/blog]/ ancestor::*[contains(@id| @class,comment)]" ment- Wa s Rand com ay to spa mming his w E the top ? This + 0S y... tells the stor

Why you might use this:Analyze competitors’ strategies for acquiring linksFind what types of links are being used to get good anchor textImprove workﬂow: Ignore placed links (comments, directory submissions, article submissions, blog networks, etc) and work on a smaller subset of EARNED links for manual analysis SCRAPE ALL! EXTERNAL LINKS!

REGEX TO!THE RESCUE! Use Case 4: I’ve scraped some data, now I need to extract some small portion of it that XPath can’t do on its own (easily)

REGEX TO!THE RESCUE! Use regular Example: expressions to pattern match Extract all @mentions of a speciﬁc user from a tweet or page structured text

REGEX TO!THE RESCUE!

EXTRACT!@ MENTIONS! /(?:^|s)@([A-z0-9_]+)/gi

Why you might use this:Pull contact information from a web site (Twitter username, email address) to improve outreach effortsExtract code fragments (like Analytics IDs and AdSense IDs) for improved competitive research REGEX TO! THE RESCUE!

BEYOND THE !SPREADSHEET! Use Case 5: I want to chain processes together, process lots of data, or allow multiple users to leverage what I build.

BEYOND THE !SPREADSHEET! Scraping outside PHP Scraping Overview: the spreadsheet 1)  CURL target page allows for more 2)  Convert to DOM Object complex systems 3)  Run Xpath Queries 4)  Store Data or Hit API to be built.

BEYOND THE !SPREADSHEET! Simple PHP Scraper Class: http://www.scrapeeverything.com

SHOW!SOME LOVE! I’m @eppievojt and I work for @jplcreative " eppie.net linkdetective.com jplcreative.com

http://www.eppie.net	7963
http://localhost	34
http://www.twylah.com	21
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	7
https://twitter.com	7
http://socialslide.herokuapp.com	4
http://www.linkedin.com	3
http://jobdanielcaicedo.blogspot.com	3
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	2
http://www.blogger.com	2
http://us-w1.rockmelt.com	2
http://excelenciadelsaber.blogspot.com	1
http://andyjturn6	1
http://www.contadorespublicosdevenezuela.com	1
http://www.google.co.uk	1
http://www.onlydoo.com	1
https://si0.twimg.com	1
http://vrindavijayan.blogspot.in	1
http://oppmodel.dev	1

The SEO's Guide to Scraping Everything

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