Get Moz API data using PHP

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Aleksandar Gichevski (G+)

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MOZ or formerly SEOmoz is the best search engine optimization suite that provides lot of SEO tools that help you in research on global most important SEO aspects.

What I like the most from this service is the ease and full reporting on information that you can’t find anywhere else. Using Moz API we can extract lot of important data by accessing some of the endpoints that MOZ offers.

An endpoint is a resource available in Mozscape and current available are:

URL metrics
Link metrics
Anchor text metrics
Top pages
Metadata

In this post I’m going to write about accessing URL metrics and getting data regarding some URL like MOZRank, Domain Authority, MOZ External Links, MOZ Total Links and other info that these days is very valuated by SEO industry.

We are going to use the MOZ Free API Access without paying. In Free API Access there are 2 types of limitations:

First, is the parameters that you can get – Check this link for more info and see what data is availabe with Free Access http://apiwiki.moz.com/url-metrics
Second, there is rate limit of one request every 10 seconds – but this is not always true because I got results within 2,3 seconds in 50% of the requests

Create MOZ Free Account

To be able to use Free MOZ API first thing that you must do is create free account.

To do so visit this link: https://moz.com/community/join

Fill the form there and make sure you use real email because you will need to validate your account and that’s it.

Generate your Access ID and API key

Second step is to generate Access ID and API key that we are going to use in our example to get data.

So after signup login to MOZ and visit: http://moz.com/products/api/keys

Click “Generate Secret Key” in the box below and your data will be generated. After completion of the process you should see screen like this:

Getting MOZ Data

After getting your Access ID and API Secret key you can now code the PHP script for getting MOZ Data.

In below example I show you how you make a call to MOZ API and get MOZRank, Domain Authority, External and Total Links for specific domain.

<?php

//Your Access ID and Secret Key
$accessID = "member-xxxxxxxxx";
$secretKey = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";

//Set domain that you need data for
$domain = 'example-domain.com';

//Expires parameter must be set in near future because MOZ API does not allow parameters set far long in future and will return error
$expire_in = time() + 500;

$SignIn = $accessID."n".$expire_in;

$binarySignature = hash_hmac('sha1', $SignIn, $secretKey, true);
$urlSafeSignature = urlencode(base64_encode($binarySignature));

//What data we want to get, we calculate all numbers together
$data = "68719495200";

$curlURL = "http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/url-metrics/?Cols=".$data."&AccessID=".$accessID."&Expires=".$expire_in."&Signature=".$urlSafeSignature;

$Domains = array($domain);
$Domains = json_encode($Domains);

//User CURL for sending request
$options = array(
	CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
	CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS     => $Domains
	);

$ch = curl_init($curlURL);
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close( $ch );

$response = json_decode($response);
print_r($response);

Replace Your Access ID, Secret Key, add the Domain in the script and you will get array of results for:

Moz Rank – 16384 (umrp, umrr), The MozRank of the URL, in both the normalized 10-point score (umrp) and the raw score (umrr)
Domain Authority – 68719476736 (pda), A normalized 100-point score representing the likelihood of a domain to rank well in search engine results
External Links – 32 (ueid), The number of external equity links to the URL
Links – 2048 (uid), The number of links (equity or nonequity or not, internal or external) to the URL

The response that you will get should look like this:


Array
(
    [0] => stdClass Object
        (
            [pda] => 19.8114141723
            [ueid] => 1
            [uid] => 1
            [umrp] => 2.69267070574
            [umrr] => 5.93757244179E-13
        )

)

From the numbers I wrote above you probably see how the $data parameter is created.. We just calculate all numbers 16384 + 68719476736 + 32 + 2048 = 68719495200

Using this script you can get all data that are allowed in Free MOZ API, while if you want some other data that is not Free then you must choose one of the MOZ Pro API packages.

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12 responses to “Get Moz API data using PHP”

ad says:

November 28, 2013 at 10:52

There is a limit of the API?

if we do a bulk, it’s not working ?

Reply
- agiche says:
  
  November 28, 2013 at 20:23
  
  There is limit, 1 request per 10 seconds… but as I wrote in post in most of cases result is returned less than 10 seconds..
  
  For bulk check it should work if you follow the rules regarding limit that is set from MOZ.
  
  Reply
Jon Hogg says:

January 17, 2014 at 12:05

Is there a way to fetch data using JSONP?

Reply
- agiche says:
  
  January 17, 2014 at 17:31
  
  I don’t think so I haven’t found a query parameter to specify the return to be JSONP
  
  Reply
Ellys says:

March 30, 2014 at 06:12

i dont understand how to use it…any more tutorial for it.

Reply
- agiche says:
  
  March 31, 2014 at 07:05
  
  Hi Ellys, MOZ has changed their process of activation recently.. I will update this post today with new information.
  
  Reply
- agiche says:
  
  March 31, 2014 at 21:54
  
  I have reviewed MOZ process and the script all is fine and still working. Just follow the steps above should be a straightforward process to implement the code where you need it.
  
  If you still can’t figure out, let me know and I will create short video how to go over the steps.
  
  Reply
Bary says:

April 20, 2014 at 02:17

Hi,

How to manage url with accents (for example http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Géant_(film)). If I let the url as is I have got {“pda”:1,”ueid”:0,”uid”:0,”upa”:1,”ut”:””,”uu”:””} but if I urlencoded I have always got {“pda”:100,”ueid”:0,”uid”:0,”upa”:1,”ut”:””,”uu”:””}. Thanks

Reply
- agiche says:
  
  April 21, 2014 at 13:53
  
  MOZ only accepts exact match on the url.. so if you do urlencode MOZ at the end won’t decode it but take it as it is and get back to u information about that encoded url.
  
  If u go here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and enter the url that u pointed as example it will throw an error, so it means at the moment MOZ does not parse the urls with accents..
  
  If they would then only that you should send it urlencode(htmlentities(URL)) to convert it to the right format.
  
  Reply
Kevin Steger says:

May 8, 2014 at 15:24

Is this method still valid?

Here is my output:

{ “status” : “401”, “error_message” : “Your authentication failed. Check your authentication details and try again. For more information on signed authentication, see: http://apiwiki.moz.com/signed-authentication” }1

Reply
- agiche says:
  
  May 8, 2014 at 19:03
  
  Hi Kevin, yes it is still valid and working. As the error says, check your MOZ Account login details. Maybe the account is not activated, or maybe is old and suspended, etc.
  
  Reply
kushal says:

June 17, 2014 at 10:24

hi , thanks for the code , can you please provide me code for accessing Link metrics ? any help would be appreciated.

Reply