Sports Reference Blog

Ways Sports Reference Can Help Your Website

Sports Reference started as a labor of love in 2000 and it took six years before we had our first full-time employee, so we know how hard it can be to grow an audience from scratch or get traction and grow an existing site. That's why we enjoy working with other websites, and it's why we make it so easy for authors and publishers to use our content on other websites.

Linker Partnerships

The Linker is our best way of driving traffic to your site while providing a service to your readers. Most sites don't have the money or time to create dedicated player pages for the sports they cover, maintain them and then embed links to the player pages from every article. The Linker works with most common content management systems and allows the Sports Reference Sites to serve as your source for player pages. Once you install the linker bookmarklet in your browser, it takes only one click (literally) to add links for player names appearing in your articles (note: we only link the first instance of a name). This gives your audience one-click access to the latest stats for the player they are reading about.

I realize this sounds like a small benefit for you and a bigger one for Sports Reference, so to even the ledger, we return the favor and link back to you from our player page, so someone viewing our LeBron James, Tom Brady, Barry Bonds, or Lionel Messi page will then see a link to your article. This allows new readers to find your site in a compelling, organic way. We do this by regularly parsing your RSS feed for links to our site and then adding the relevant article to our list of articles in the player newsfeed both on their player page and on their player news archive.

A full description and short video of how the Linker works and how to sign up can be found below for each of our sites:
Basketball-Reference.com
Baseball-Reference.com
Pro-Football-Reference.com
Hockey-Reference.com
CBB at Sports Reference
CFB at Sports Reference
FBref.com, our Football/Soccer site (also of note is that the fbref.com linker is language-specific, so if you write in any of the six languages we cover, your readers can be directly sent to the proper site.)

From Tim Dierkes of MLB Trade Rumors:

The Sports Reference linker tool has saved my writers tons of time across the four Trade Rumors sites. We use it to automatically link all full player names to their Sports Reference pages, which takes just a few seconds for our writers and allows our readers to jump over and check the stats for any player we mention.

Tools to Share Stats

We have two primary tools for sharing stats on the site.

The first is the Modify & Share tool which is available on nearly every stats table on a Sports Reference site. If there is a table of data you want to embed in your website for your readers, you can take any of our tables, delete unneeded rows and columns and then use the resulting table in a number of different ways.

We have a short video that describes how to do this:
YouTube: How to Share Stats from Sports-Reference

If you have any questions about any of the tools or how we might work together in other ways, please reach out to us via our Feedback form.

This Month in Sports Reference Newsletter

This Month in SR is a simple, no more than monthly newsletter that will let you know all of the new features, updates, corrections and more that we've implemented in the past week. If you are someone who relies on SR professionally or even just love what we do, this newsletter will help you become a power user so you can use our tools to their fullest.