The new SEO API 1.10v is released: Upgrade your implementation in 5 minutes
Yesterday, 7th of September, our team has released the brand new version of the WSA API. The 1.10 version focuses on removing all the Yahoo! Search features that were deprecated by Yahoo Inc. Moreover it targets on increasing the speed & the accuracy of the tools and on adding new features on the existing toolbox. In this article we discuss the changes that took place and we explain how to upgrade your current API implementation in only 5 minutes.
What is the API and why you should use it?
The term API stands for the words Application Programming Interface and it is a way to access our toolbox directly from your own website or software without using our web interface. The API allows you to perform all the functions that you can do from our website such us generating new reports, managing and checking the history and the stored reports etc. The main advantage of using our API is that you can create truly unique SEO Reports by using your own designs, combine the output of various tools and create new SEO tools or even connect 3rd party services such as Google Analytics.
The API is an ideal solution for companies that want to create new services and tools or for the SEO & Online Marketing agencies that want to automate the reporting process and provide high quality reports to their clients. The API can be used by all the modern programming languages that support web requests (PHP, ASP, C#, VB, Java etc).
All the information concerning the use of our API along with the documentation and several code samples in various languages can be found on our API page.
What is new in this version?
As we stressed on our previous release, all the features that were related to Yahoo Search have been deprecated. Since Yahoo no longer has an index of its own, some of the features no longer made sense and thus they had to be removed. In this new API version, the Yahoo Search option is no longer supported and information such as the indexing status and the total number of indexed pages in Yahoo has been removed.
At the same time our team ensured that none of the useful metrics and statistics that used to come from Yahoo Site Explorer is going to be removed. Thus information such as the Backlink URL List and the number of incoming links is still available through our toolbox. Last but not least few expansions and additions where made in some of the tools.
Which tools have be affected by the update? Upgrading your API client in 5 minutes.
Our team made drastic changes not only on the tools but also on the core of our service. Nevertheless at the same time we kept the new API interface as compatible as possible with the previous version. Since the only features that were removed are the ones that are related to the Yahoo Index, upgrading your current API implementation is very simple.
The tools that have been affected by the update are the following. Please note that for more information concerning the technical details of the update you should refer to the new API manual.
Web SEO Analysis
The only features that have been removed are the ones related to Indexing. As a result the total number of Indexed Pages in Yahoo (totalInYahoo
) and the Indexed in Yahoo (yahoo
field, child of indexation
) fields are now removed. As a result the only change that is required is to remove the above 2 fields from your API client.
Indexed Pages
Similarly to the above the only features that were removed are the ones related to Yahoo Index. As a result the only change that is required is to remove the fields totalInYahoo
and yahoo
from your API client.
Domain Battle
The only feature that was removed is the field related to the Total Number of Indexed Pages in Yahoo (indexedPagesYahoo
). To upgrade your API client just remove this field from your implementation.
SERP Analysis
Similarly to the above the only feature that was removed is Total Number of Indexed Pages in Yahoo (indexedPagesYahoo
). Additionally a new field became available which provides the total number of results (totalFoundResults
) that were found on the targeted search engines for the particular query. To upgrade your API client just remove the indexedPagesYahoo
field from your implementation and optionally store the content of the totalFoundResults
field.
Blog Analyzer
The only features that have been removed are the ones related to Indexing in Yahoo. As a result the total number of Indexed Pages of the domain & blog in Yahoo (indexedPagesYahoo
& blogIndexedPagesYahoo
) and the Indexed in Yahoo (yahoo
field, child of indexation
) are no longer available. To upgrade your API client just remove these fields from your implementation.
Keyword Difficulty
A new field became available which provides the total number of results (totalFoundResults
) that were found on the targeted search engines for each query. To upgrade your API implementation you can optionally store this field.
Keyword Battle
In the previous version if the queries were made in Google, an additional field was available to the user which provided the total number of results that were found for each query (foundResults
). In this version this field becomes available also for Bing. Last but not least the Yahoo Search support has been removed.
Changing the API handlers
The final change that is required in order to upgrade your API client is to send all of your web requests to the new API handlers. Thus instead of calling the URL:
http://www.webseoanalytics.com/api/1.0/newReport.php
you should call the URL:
http://www.webseoanalytics.com/api/1.1/newReport.php
The same applies for all the other API actions such as viewSubscriptions
, viewList
, deleteReport
and viewReport
.
The above are the only changes that one should make in order to make his implementation compatible with the new version. Nevertheless as we said earlier this is not just an API update but an update on our main SEO. It targeted on increasing the speed and accuracy of the toolbox and more specifically in this version we started to use more metrics and statistics that come directly from our Index.
Some of the most important things that are calculated differently are the number of incoming links, the list of backlinks, the authority of the domain, the language of the text, the analysis of the URLs etc. As a consequence all the tools that use the above information are expected to provide slightly different results comparing to the old version. Of course no additional modifications or updates are necessary on your API code in order to be compatible with the new version (except of course the ones that were mentioned above).
For how long will the old version be available?
The new version of the toolbox has immediately replaced the previous one and as a result the old one is no longer available through our website. The 1.0x version will remain available only through the API until the 31st of December 2011 nevertheless no support or updates will be provided for it. The API users are strongly advised to upgrade their API clients as soon as possible to ensure that their implementations will remain fully functional.
Upgrading your current API client is very simple and it should not take you more than 5-10 minutes.
Don’t forget that your feedback is always welcome! Happy coding! 🙂