[Excel How To:] Get Usable Data from Yahoo Site Explorer

A great way to get links is to actually find where other webmasters are going to drop links. Everyone's favorite tool seems to be Yahoo Site Explorer, especially since Yahoo seems to do a much better job than Google in recording backlinks. I came across a site that had thousands of backlinks today and wanted to share a good way of using Excel to get a usable backlink picture.

1. In your web explorations you might come across someone who looks to be doing some aggressive linkbuilding. Here's a blog post on a random web 2.0 property I came across:



2. Take the anchor link (above the site that "Air Jordan Fusion 3" links to) and put it into Yahoo Site Explorer:


[I'm using the Chrome web browser with SEO Site Tools installed. This shows you the PR of the backlinks (you can also use the SEOQuake extension, which allows you to sort by PR). Anyway, the PR of the links is not being factored here - I just wanted to let you know why it looks a bit different in the screen shot above.]

There are thousands of links to this domain, so

1. We only want backlinks so we choose "Except from this domain"
2. This gives us a little over 900 backlinks, which we can export to excel.

3. Ok, 900 links is still alot to analyze, so that's where excel can help us. First thing we do is to get just the root domain from the URLs. We do this by selecting our column of URLs in excel and using the export Text to Column function.



Using Text to Columns, we can have excel interpret the "/" in a URL as a column separator. For example, gets put into 4 columns:
http: | | domain.com | page
We specify that we want the data to start in column B (so that we don't overwrite our urls), and we now have our domains in a separate column. You can delete the "http:" and other columns - we just want the domains, so it'll look like this:



[Ok, seems there's a limit to 4 pics per post, so I'm going to continue this in Using Excel with Yahoo Site Explorer - part 2.]