RAhrefs 0.1.4.9000 (development version)

R package for SEO specialists which serves as an interface for Ahrefs API.

• What is Ahrefs?
• News
• Features
• Acquiring API access token
• Testing
• Installation
• Authentication
• Checking available reports
• Checking available metrics
• Creating conditions
• Usage
• Other Ahrefs API packages

What is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is a research toolset for backlinks and SEO analysis that enables access to off-site data.

News

For more, see the NEWS.md

• v0.1.4 released on CRAN
• v0.1.4 - fixing condition creating function - there was an error with regex-like operators
• v0.1.3 - fixing wrong assertthat usage in helper function

Features

• Authenticate with an API key
• Download data from 24 Ahrefs reports as formatted data frames
• Use ordering with "order_by" parameter
• Create your own selecting conditions with "where and "having" clauses (experimental)

Acquiring API access token

Visit your Ahrefs API profile and copy your API access token.

Testing

IMPORTANT NOTE: for testing purposes, target "ahrefs.com" domain - no API credits will be used.

Installation

# main version on CRAN:
install.packages("RAhrefs")

# development version:
# install.packages("devtools")
# devtools::install_github("Leszek-Sieminski/RAhrefs")

Authentication

library("RAhrefs")
api_key <- "012345"
RAhrefs::rah_auth(api_key)
# will return "API authorized" if success

Checking available reports

To check what Ahrefs data are available in R through API, you need to check provided help dataset:

library("RAhrefs")
View(ahrefs_reports) # view dataset in a new tab (RStudio)
print(head(ahrefs_reports, 5)) # see first 5 reports in the console

# >         report_name          function_name                                                                                   short_description                                             url_address
# > 1        ahrefs_rank        rah_ahrefs_rank                                                                 Contains the URLs and the rankings.        https://ahrefs.com/api/documentation/ahrefs-rank
# > 2            anchors            rah_anchors Contains the anchor text and the num of backlinks, referring pages and referring domains that has it.            https://ahrefs.com/api/documentation/anchors
# > 3 anchors_refdomains rah_anchors_refdomains                               Contains the num of anchors and backlinks with that anchor, per domain. https://ahrefs.com/api/documentation/anchors-refdomains
# > 4          backlinks          rah_backlinks           Contains the backlinks and details of the referring pages, such as anchor and page title.          https://ahrefs.com/api/documentation/backlinks
# > 5 backlinks_new_lost rah_backlinks_new_lost                              Contains the new or lost backlinks and details of the referring pages. https://ahrefs.com/api/documentation/backlinks-new-lost

Checking available metrics

To check what metrics can be choosen, you need to check provided help dataset:

library("RAhrefs")
View(ahrefs_metrics) # view dataset in a new tab (RStudio)
print(head(ahrefs_metrics, 5)) # see first 5 metrics in the console

# >         metric   type use_where? use_having?                                  description
# > 1      url_from string       TRUE        TRUE URL of the page where the backlink is found.
# > 2        url_to string       TRUE        TRUE URL of the page the backlink is pointing to.
# > 3   ahrefs_rank    int       TRUE        TRUE            URL Rating of the referring page.
# > 4 domain_rating    int      FALSE        TRUE       Domain Rating of the referring domain.
# > 5    ahrefs_top    int      FALSE        TRUE            Ahrefs Rank of the target domain.

However, different functions can accept different metrics for experimental where & having conditions. To find out which ones are available for a particular function, check that function's documentation.

Creating conditions

Ahrefs API can use where, having and order_by parameters. However, behaviour of where and having may change in further updates.

# first, create all needed conditions in single form:
cond_1 <- RAhrefs::rah_condition(
  column_name = "first_seen",
  operator = "GREATER_THAN",
  value = "2018-01-01",
  is_date = TRUE)

cond_2 <- RAhrefs::rah_condition(
  column_name = "backlinks",
  operator = "GREATER_THAN",
  value = "10")

# next, create a set of conditions from them:
final_condition_set <- RAhrefs::rah_condition_set(cond_1, cond_2)

# finally, use the set of conditions to download choosen results:
result <- RAhrefs::rah_anchors(
  target = "ahrefs.com", 
  limit = 1000, 
  where = final_condition_set)

Usage

# library ----------------------------
library("RAhrefs")

# authentication ---------------------
api_key <- "012345"
RAhrefs::rah_auth(api_key)

# downloading data -------------------
ahrefs_data <- RAhrefs::rah_anchors(
  target = "ahrefs.com",
  mode = "domain",
  limit = 2,
  where   = RAhrefs::rah_condition_set(
    RAhrefs::rah_condition(
      column_name = "backlinks",
      operator = "GREATER_THAN",
      value = "10"),
    RAhrefs::rah_condition(
      column_name = "refpages",
      operator = "GREATER_THAN",
      value = "20")),
  order_by = "refpages:asc")
  
print(ahrefs_data)
# >      anchor backlinks refpages refdomains          first_seen        last_visited
# > 1.21 driver        42       21          1 2018-06-06 07:16:28 2019-01-05 10:37:13
# >    a href's        21       21          1 2015-11-22 14:30:18 2015-11-22 14:30:18

str(ahrefs_data)
# > 'data.frame':	2 obs. of  6 variables:
# >  $ anchor      : chr  "1.21 driver" "a href's"
# >  $ backlinks   : int  42 21
# >  $ refpages    : int  21 21
# >  $ refdomains  : int  1 1
# >  $ first_seen  : POSIXct, format: "2018-06-06 07:16:28" "2015-11-22 14:30:18"
# >  $ last_visited: POSIXct, format: "2019-01-05 10:37:13" "2015-11-22 14:30:18"

Other Ahrefs API packages

• PHP - ahrefs/ahrefs-api-php
• R - mhairi/ahrefs
• Node JS - ybonnefond/node-ahrefs
• Python - spremotely/ahrefs-api-python