Anyways to pull anchor text?

[jayoliverwright]

Hi guys,

So basically i have a list of URLs/Domains and there backlinks (example: http://s29.postimg.org/ujxm0c4lj/screenshot_677.jpg) but i'm missing anchor text. Can anyone recommend any tools which can scan a backlink, locate the URL/Domain on the page and then pull the anchor text?

Cheers, Chris

<colgroup><col width="548"><col width="884"></colgroup>
|   |   |

[CleverPhD]

Screaming Frog can do this with custom extraction and list mode.  If I am reading your question correctly, you have a list of URLs and what pages on your site that they link to.

You would upload the list of URLs into Screaming Frog so it knows what pages to scan and run it in list mode

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/configuration/#15

You would then use the custom extraction tool to grep for the ahref code that has a link to your domain

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/web-scraper/

You would need to plug in a regular expression to look for your domain (or versions of it) and then include the rest of the HTML tag that include the anchor text all the way through the ending .

You should then be able to import that data into a spreadsheet and use text to columns to split the anchor text into it's own column.

It is a little tricky as the regular expression may have to be tweaked depending on how other sites link to your site.  Run the Frog on a test group of 10 or so to make sure it works.  If you have a bunch of errors, take the error examples and tweak the regular expression based on those.

[jayoliverwright]

Thanks CleverPhD, sorry should had mentioned i'm looking to do this for multiple domain names not just one. So the method you describe works great for a single domain.

[CleverPhD]

Ok.  Can you be more specific on what you are trying to accomplish with this data? I think that may help my understanding of what you are trying to do.

[jayoliverwright]

Basically want the anchor text, so I can easily identify the location of the link on the page without needing to view source and search for the URL.

This export is directly from: http://s29.postimg.org/ujxm0c4lj/screenshot_677.jpg

Scrapebox backlink checker which doesn't give you anchor text.

[CleverPhD]

Thanks Jay. If I look on the backlinks side, they all seem to have the same subdomain in some form or another.  You would just need to setup the regex in Screaming Frog to look for just that keyword in the subdomain so it should match all the variants of it.

That said, ignore everything I just posted.  I was thinking earlier, "Surely there is scraper software out there that does this already."  I did not take the time to look.  Your mention of Scrapebox reminded me of that.

Scrapebox has a separate addon that does this

http://www.scrapebox.com/anchor-text-checker

The ScrapeBox Anchor Text Checker allows you to enter your domain and then load a list of URL’s that contain your backlink. It will scan all the URL’s containing your link and extract the anchor text used by the websites that link to you.

[MattRoney]

Hi Jay! Did you get this worked out?

[jayoliverwright]

Hi Matt!

No i have not yet found a tool which can do this.

The _ScrapeBox Anchor Text plugin _CleverPhD mentioned can only do this for one domain at a time. I need it for multiple domains.

Any other suggestions?