Yahoo! Site Explorer – Excel Export
The beauty of Yahoo! Site Explorer is not just in the data that it presents to you for free. There is also beauty in the ways it gives you to extract that data. At the top right of the list of URLs that Site Explorer presents, there is a handy Export first 1000 results to TSV option. How convenient. This is a godsend. This facility allows us to not only scan our results much quicker than paging through them 100 at a time, but it also gives us the opportunity to analyse them in Excel!
If you click on the TSV link and choose to open the file using a text editor like notepad, you can simply press ctrl-f to search the document. I like to do this if I just need to know that there’s at least one occurrence of a piece of text. For example, if you’re using Yahoo! Site Explorer to analyse the inbound links of a site, you could open the results in notepad and then search for things like “dmoz.org”, “.edu”, “.gov” etc. You can also do this with Excel but opening notepad is far quicker than opening Excel. Also, not everyone has Excel installed on their machine.
If you do have Excel on your machine, that’s a whole different ballgame. You can then open the .TSV file using Excel and really manipulate that data. Let’s walk through a few scenarios here and now.
Once you’ve exported the list to Excel, the most basic thing you can do with it is sort it by URL sequence. This will display all the linking URL’s in order and will enable you to get a feel for how many different sites are linking to the one you’re investigating. Often, a site seems like a fantastic find because it has thousands of inbound links to it. If all those links are from one forum signature link, suddenly those links don’t seem that valuable. Sorting the list of linking URLs enables you to see whether there is a large group that are from the same domain.
To sort the list of URLs, select the URL column in Excel and then click Home > Editing > Sort & Filter > Sort A to Z. This will sort the list in alphabetical sequence.
The next thing you might do with your list of linking URLs is to filter the list to find desirable links. To do this, you’ll need to select the URL column again and then click Home > Editing > Sort and Filter > Filter.
Now in the top right of the column you’ll see a down arrow: click that and then select Text Filters > Contains.
Now the important bit: specify what TLD of inbound links we are interested in. First of all let’s check for .edu links. Ensure that the filter is set to contains, type in .edu and click OK.
The filtered list now contains only links from pages that exist on .edu domains. Other examples of links you might be interested in are:
- .edu
- .gov
- dmoz.org
- wikipedia.org
- other authoritative sites in your niche