You're using Yahoo Site Explorer to analyse the inbound links of a website you're interested in buying. You can even export the first 1,000 inbound links as TSV and look at the data in Excel. However, you have to eyeball the list and step through it manually to determine unique linking domains.

Why are we interested in unique linking domains? As far as search engine rankings go, links from the same domain are not as powerful as links from separate domains. For example, a link each from 1,000 different sites will do your site more good than 1,000 links from the same site. So how can you determine what the unique linking domains are from the list that Yahoo Site Explorer gives you?

If you have money to burn, you can throw away YSE like an old boot in favour of getting a shiny paid subscription to Open Site Explorer from SEOMoz that will allow you to look at linking domains. At the time of writing, that costs $79/month.

But what if you are a tight-arsed cheapskate?

Never fear, the SPGazette Cheapo Domain Extraction Excel Spreadsheet is here!

There are initially 2 worksheets in this workbook:

• links - paste the inbound link URLs from Yahoo Site Explorer into the first column.
• TLDs - a list of '.com', '.net' etc. This is not an exhaustive list, so add those that are missing.

To start the extract, press CTRL-SHIFT-E and make a cup of tea. The extract will create a new sheet called "domains" that will contain a list of unique linking domains. You can then assess the linking profle for the website you're analysing.

Note that this utility is so cheap that you have to delete the "domains" sheet before you run the next extract, otherwise it crashes!