Recipe
The weekly recipe for ten minutes of link data
Four calls, one notebook file, one named weekday. This is the plain way to check backlink movement for your site and a few rivals without opening a big audit tool.
What you are cooking
Think of it as a small meal, not a banquet. Each week you collect the same few numbers, in the same order, and add one line to a file.
The point is not any single reading. After four to six entries you can see whether your referring domains are creeping up, standing still or sliding, which is the only question a ten-minute routine needs to answer.
Our own crawler and our own link index feed every call. The index refreshes about once a month, so a link someone added last week may not appear yet. Hence the short recipe.
If you also want to see how rivals compare, the rival gap table shows how to read the numbers.
Ingredients and what each costs
| Ingredient | Action | Cost per call |
|---|---|---|
| Your DR and referring domains | overview | Free, no key |
| A few rivals side by side | compare (up to 20 domains) | 1 credit |
| A quick scan of a long list | bulk_dr (up to 2,000 domains) | 1 credit |
| Who links to you | refdomains | 2 credits |
| Which phrases point at you | anchors | 2 credits |
The method, five small moves
Warm up with the free call
Run overview for your own domain. It needs no key, so it is a gentle start and a quick test that the command works.
Add the rivals
Use compare with up to 20 domains in one call. Keep the same three or four rivals every week, because swapping them ruins the trend.
Scan the long list
If you manage a bundle of sites or a list of prospects, bulk_dr takes up to 2,000 domains per call for 1 credit. One call, one charge.
Once a month, pull the names
Fetch refdomains with per=100 and order=desc. Save the file, then compare it with last month's to see which domains arrived and which left.
Write one line
Date, your DR, your referring domains, and a three-word mood such as flat, rising or odd. Close the file. You are done.
The requests, ready to paste
Replace the placeholder key and the domains. Every authenticated response includes an ok flag and a _credits field with the cost and your remaining balance.
# 1. free, no key
curl "https://rankdose.com/api.php?action=overview&q=yourdomain.com"
# 2. one credit: many domains at once
curl "https://rankdose.com/api.php?action=bulk_dr&domains=yourdomain.com,rival-one.com,rival-two.com&key=sk_live_..."
# 3. two credits, monthly: who links to you
curl "https://rankdose.com/api.php?action=refdomains&q=yourdomain.com&per=100&order=desc&key=sk_live_..."
# header style also works
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_..." "https://rankdose.com/api.php?action=anchors&q=yourdomain.com"A worked example, clearly invented
Here is a made-up month for a made-up flower shop. It is only an example, so please do not read the numbers as data about any real site.
In week one the shop writes down 41 referring domains. Weeks two and three show 41 again, which is normal when the index has not refreshed. Then week four. It jumps to 47, and the monthly pull shows six new names, two of them local bloggers.
That is a good dose: six names to say thank you to, nothing to panic about. Because DR here is round(100 · log(ref_domains+1) / log(20,000,000)), 41 domains gives 22 and 47 gives 23, so the score barely twitched while the people behind it grew.
Say the weekly part is one compare plus one bulk_dr call, and the monthly part adds two 2-credit pulls. That is 2 credits most weeks and 6 in the heavy week, well under a tenth of a cent each time, against a $100 free balance.