How to get Alexa audience geography using curl? [closed] - php

Question

Closed. This question is not reproducible or was caused by typos. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question was caused by a typo or a problem that can no longer be reproduced. While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one was resolved in a way less likely to help future readers.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I am trying to get the top 3 countries from Alexa report but I am unable to access the site using curl. But when I do I am getting an error from Alexa telling me to sign up with Amazon. I know curl is unblockable but they seem to have done it.
$url="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com";
$agent= 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
$result=curl_exec($ch);
echo('<textarea>'.$result.'</textarea>');

Answer 1

This should work. Note I used a standard set of curl options I like to use. Feel free to adjust based on your actual needs. The reason I did that is because while you are setting $agent you are not actually passing that to curl in any way. So my options properly sets CURLOPT_USERAGENT as well as a few other things.
$url ="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com";
$agent = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSLVERSION, 3);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $agent);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo('<textarea>'.$result.'</textarea>');
And here are my results from my local test environment where I am using PHP 5.4 via MAMP on a Macintosh.
EDIT: According to the original poster, this script works on one host but not another where he is met with a “403: Forbidden” error. Which points to some kind of blocking happening on the Alexa server. I would recommend debugging by using curl -I from the command line like this:
curl -I http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com
And on my local Mac OS X 10.9.4 setup, I get this in response to the request:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 01:24:51 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: rpt=%21; expires=Fri, 11-Jul-2014 02:24:51 GMT; domain=alexa.com
Set-Cookie: lv=1404955491; expires=Fri, 10-Jul-2015 07:24:51 GMT; path=/; domain=alexa.com
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Connection: keep-alive
The HTTP/1.1 200 OK means all is good. If you run the same command from the command line & get anything other than that, you can bet you are being blocked. Possibly a block based just on an IP range. Or even blocked via something like ModSecurity which would do heuristic analysis of traffic to catch & block non-standard web requests. Regardless, if you are being blocked on the server side of this, there is not much you can do to unblock yourself.
That said, note how I properly set $agent in my version of the script but you didn’t? It could be in your testing you ran so many curl requests without a proper user agent while testing your IP is now temporarily blocked. So wait a day or two & try again but with my version of the script so a proper user agent is set. I bet it will work fine then.

Answer 2

It appears it is a simple coding error, try the following:
$url="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com";
$agent= 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
$result=curl_exec($ch);
echo '<textarea>'.$result.'</textarea>';
You missed the periods (.) after the '<textarea>' and before the '</textarea>' to make it include them, and the echo function doesn't require parenthesis.
I have tested this and it worked for me.