Anyway To Get Access To Ahrefs API Without Paying $500/mo

by nik0 Banned

Posted: 11 years ago 23 replies

I want to know the ahrefs URL rank of the backlinks of a domain.

I instructed a programmer to make such tool for me, which would also check the PR and the amount of links on the page of each backlink.

Now that it's done I found out that my OpenAPP API credits aren't any good :S

And that I have to shell out $500/month for a tool that I only plan to use now and again for personal use.

Any other way around this?

#$500 or mo #access #ahrefs #api #paying

MikeFriedman

11 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

I had looked into something similar. The message I got from their support was 'No'.

Hope you did not spend too much on the programming.

Thanks
1 reply

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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

I had looked into something similar. The message I got from their support was 'No'.

Hope you did not spend too much on the programming.

Just a few hundred, but very misleading with their bullsh!t credits, I mean what's the issue for them to give paid members an equal amount of credits for the amount we pay, we can look all the stats and download like 30 million links through CSV file but can't get a single link from their API without paying 500 more PER month.

Thanks
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MikeFriedman

11 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

I did not get it either, but whatever. Their business. Their rules.

My inquiry was a few months ago. Maybe they have changed since then, so it might be worth trying to contact them again.

Thanks
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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

I did not get it either, but whatever. Their business. Their rules.

My inquiry was a few months ago. Maybe they have changed since then, so it might be worth trying to contact them again.

Just added them to Skype, let's see what they have to say.

Thanks
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Mike Anthony

11 years ago

They changed it up 6 months to a year ago as I recall. then jacked the prices up across the board. In addition when I used to use the previous API due to how they count "rows" you could tear into your allowance pretty fast

Thats why I use majestic - between historic and fresh it covers most of the links ahrefs does. I haven't found the difference in link coverage worth it. Also don't need to hire a programmer since rddz works with both and Moz.

Though the Moz hate here is great (and irrational) its good to have it in an API tool because you can do a prelim check on a domain for free and reserve your Majestic API use for domains you want to check closely

Thanks
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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Isn't Majestic charging 250 English Pounds a month for API access? Yes it is, only the Platinium package offers API access.

What is rddz? Just found but for that you also need to have either the $500/mo Ahrefs plan or 250 Pounds/mo Majestic plan it seems or are your OpenAPP credits good there?

Thanks
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Mike Anthony

11 years ago

NO all but the free package offers access similar to how you thought Ahrefs did. The app installation will need to be authorized through their onapp system but usually just a few clicks and entering in your key

RDDZ is this

http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...-anywhere.html

Good guys and usually implement suggestions. They recently added live link check at my request

Originally Posted by nik0

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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

I'm not trying to nit pick, I think the rddz guys might be French based on the sales page screenshots but you might want to tell them there's a big difference between the words scrap & scrape. I see the word scrap on both the sales page (Scrap Anything from Anywhere) & software screenshots. Not sure If it's a language issue or what.

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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

Found them in Google and ended up on a French site indeed.

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Mike Anthony

11 years ago

yeah they are from France and yeah you are nitpicking.

Software works thats all I give a flip about. Germans and Russians have even bigger issues with English but they have some great programmers. People can give them a try and worry about their spelling issues later. I have no affiliation with them whatsoever so anyone can help correct their English.

Thanks
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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

I speak English, scrap means junk or throw away. Scrape means parse.

Nobody is looking to scrap their link profile.

Anyways, it wasn't meant to be dissing on the software, the software looks decent from what I've seen.

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Mike Anthony

11 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

Just added them to Skype, let's see what they have to say.

Probably how would you like to subscribe for $500 a month...lol

Thanks
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MikeFriedman

11 years ago

Yeah, I don't really blame Ahrefs for charging what they do though. I'm sure it is not cheap to try crawl the entire internet and store every link. That kind of data storage cost must be astronomical. Plus they probably have to use the latest and greatest storage devices in order to return results to users quickly.

I cancelled Ahrefs months ago though. In general, of the big 3, OSE, Majestic, and Ahrefs, I found that OSE finds the fewest number of links by far (or just stores the fewest), then Majestic, and Ahrefs most frequently finds the most. However, it is very, very rare that there are any good links that are not found by both Majestic and Ahrefs. That wasn't always the case, but it seems to be now. It seemed stupid to keep paying for both, and Ahrefs metrics are the least reliable between OSE, Majestic, and Ahrefs.

Now if I was working on a link cleanup project, I would probably want Ahrefs between the three because it will find more of the junk links, which is what you are looking for.

Thanks
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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

I already pay monthly to have access to the exact same data, only the way of delivery is different, either a CSV download which is possible and what I pay for, or through an API so small effort for them to offer the same data through API as well, with less credits obvious than with the $500/mo plan.

As for metrics, actually I find Ahrefs URL rank (not to confuse with Ahrefs Domain Rank) way more reliable then Moz's PA to determine the strength of a link so I'm quite dissappointed by this and Majestics TF is a big joke (not to mention MozRank which seems like a total made up metric in most cases, I was a bit positive about it a while ago but after doing more and more domain research it's just a nonsense metric).

So I wanted to use Ahrefs URL rank as a semi replacement for Pagerank or at least have access to the most reliable of the three.

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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

How was Backlinkminer handling those APIs?

I never understood how the programmer profited, surely he was paying out money to support user link data.

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Mike Anthony 11 years ago

Bakclinkminer never used paid Apis (except if you entered them into the setting category and even then there was no majestic or Ahrefs)
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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

How was Backlinkminer handling those APIs?

I never understood how the programmer profited, surely he was paying out money to support user link data.

There was a tool similar to backlinkminder that allowed me to enter my Ahrefs API but last time I reinstalled that software I received the message that my API is not valid, that was never the case before (probably like Mike said, more then 6 months or a year ago).

Thanks
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Mike Anthony

11 years ago

That might have been backlink monitor from Inspyder which used to work with the old API. However ahrefs shut down the old APi entirely. No tool will work with it.RDDZ scraper is the only tool I know that works well. Couple glitches (tends to hang when I do majestic access but click abort and its done (majestic allows download of all links one shot so its pretty quick) then you can run Pagerank and live link checks

Originally Posted by nik0

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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Yes indeed, backlink monitor that was.

So how does RDDZ work in terms of API? No need for paid API account, only regular account?

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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

I started working on a new live link checker/scraper.

What I did was setup 10 threads (during testing) download each individual backlink page HTML & then do all the link checking offline with regex. Regex is lightening fast but there will always be a bottleneck at the internet speed which would be different for each user since everyone has different ISPs.

Once you have the backlink page HTML offline you can do anything you want (fast) parsing that data. Example, is the backlink live, counting OBLs, page title text, etc...

I wouldn't be surprised If Google drops that PR API soon, one more reason to not use APIs (dropped support, cost, outdated data).

Anyways, the live data would be up to date compared to any outdated API data where they only scrape links per domain once a month or whenever.

If you rethink your strategy you might be able to salvage your software.

Thanks
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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

Where did you pull the actual backlinks from?

My idea was to enter a list of 100-200 domains, and pull the backlinks with metrics from the API, sort them by Ahrefs URL rank, Pagerank or PA (up to what I select) to have a quick overview of the links of each domain, instead of entering each domain manually into Ahrefs.

Later on while busy with that idea I already started to get the impression that this might eat a lot of API credits so maybe it's better I abadoned the whole idea, API's row definition isn't completely clear to me, they say 1000 rows = $1 or something if you want to buy on top of the $500/mo subscription. What if a domain has 50k backlinks, would that equal 50000 rows and thus $50 on credits?

Thanks
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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

Later on while busy with that idea I already started to get the impression that this might eat a lot of API credits so maybe it's better I abadoned the whole idea, API's row definition isn't completely clear to me, they say 1000 rows = $1 or something if you want to buy on top of the $500/mo subscription. What if a domain has 50k backlinks, would that equal 50000 rows and thus $50 on credits?

Yea, I looked at those sales pages a while back & it's confusing. I'm not shelling out money only to find out it only gets my foot in the door to end up shelling out more money for the same thing (where does it end?).

Thanks
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nik0

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

I do like everyone else use 3rd party combined with list of links I've built, that's about the best anyone can do considering the 3rd party databases have the resources to scrape the web on a massive scale.

Maybe we're doing two different things here, I'm checking a list of links for established domains to verify the links still exist. I guess your checking unknown domain link profiles (shopping for domains)?

Yea, I looked at those sales pages a while back & it's confusing. I'm not shelling out money only to find out it only gets my foot in the door to end up shelling out more money for the same thing (where does it end?).

Shopping for domains indeed, while seeing metrics like PA, URL rank, PR sorted for me in front of me, the whole benefit idea was that I could load in let's say 100 domains and quickly analyze all of them instead of entering them one by one.

Especially with the non updated PR I wanted to check those free to register truly expired domain lists by doing a quick pre-filtering using DomCop. Thing is non of these metrics on itself mean a thing and to manually start analyzing each backlink profile is simply an ineffective waste of time for me.

The old process was to download the csv from Ahrefs, after giving it a quick peek in their dashboard and then doing a PR check in Scrapebox as well as alive checker, but that's a lot of work to do for 100 domains at a time.

Thanks

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Anyway To Get Access To Ahrefs API Without Paying $500/mo

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