Extracting Domains from URL Lists
Paste a list of URLs and this tool pulls the domain out of each one, then ranks the domains by how many URLs point to them. The www prefix is stripped so example.com and www.example.com count together.
The count is usually the interesting part. A list of five hundred backlink URLs tells you little; the same list reduced to eighty domains with their counts tells you immediately which sites actually matter to your link profile.
Why domains matter more than URLs in link analysis
Search engines weight links from distinct domains far more heavily than repeated links from one. Fifty links from a single site are worth considerably less than fifty links from fifty sites, because the first pattern is easy to manufacture and the second is not.
This is why referring domains, rather than total backlinks, is the number most SEO tools lead with. A profile of 10,000 links from 40 domains is weaker than 800 links from 600 domains, despite looking better on the headline figure.
Reducing a URL list to domains with counts gives you that view directly. It also surfaces the sitewide links — a footer or sidebar link appearing on every page of a partner site, which shows up as one domain with hundreds of URLs.
What you can use it for
- Backlink audits — turning a raw link export into a referring-domains list.
- Outbound link audits — seeing which external sites your own content links to most.
- Checking a competitor's link sources for domains you could also earn links from.
- Spotting sitewide links, which appear as one domain with a disproportionate URL count.
- Cleaning a prospect list before outreach, so you do not email the same site five times.
Reading the counts
A domain with many URLs pointing to you is not automatically better than one with a single link. It usually means a sitewide placement — a footer, sidebar or blogroll link repeated across the site — which search engines discount heavily precisely because it is one editorial decision rather than many.
A domain with one link from a genuinely relevant article is frequently worth more. When auditing, the domains with a single contextual link are often your best links, and the ones with three hundred are often a template.
Very high counts from unfamiliar domains are worth investigating for a different reason. Scraper sites and low-quality directories generate large numbers of links automatically, and a link profile dominated by those is a pattern worth knowing about.
Auditing your own outbound links
Running your own site's external links through this shows where you send authority. A handful of domains receiving most of your outbound links may be intentional — cited sources, partners — or may be an artefact of a widget or template nobody has reviewed in years.
For a single page rather than a whole site, the Internal Link Analyzer extracts every link with its anchor text and splits internal from external, which is the more detailed view.
To collect the URLs in the first place from a block of text or HTML, the Extract URLs from Text tool pulls out every unique link.
Subdomains and how they are treated
This tool extracts the full hostname minus the www prefix, so blog.example.com and shop.example.com are reported as separate domains. That is the right default for link analysis, since subdomains are frequently run independently.
It does mean a site using many subdomains appears as several entries rather than one. If you want them grouped, that is a manual step — automatic grouping would require a public suffix list to avoid mistakenly merging genuinely separate sites on shared hosting.
Country-code domains with second-level suffixes, such as example.co.uk, are handled correctly as single domains because the full hostname is preserved rather than being truncated at the last two segments.
Preparing a list first
If your list contains tracking parameters or inconsistent formatting, clean it before extracting. The URL Cleaner strips tracking, the Bulk URL Formatter normalises casing and slashes, and the URL Deduplicator removes repeated entries.
For domain extraction specifically, the deduplication step changes the counts meaningfully — a list where the same URL appears three times inflates that domain's count without adding any information.
Frequently asked questions
Are subdomains counted separately?
Yes. blog.example.com and shop.example.com are reported as separate domains, which is the right default for link analysis since subdomains are often run independently. Only the www prefix is stripped.
Is a domain with many links better than one with a single link?
Usually not. A high count normally indicates a sitewide footer or sidebar link, which search engines discount heavily. A single contextual link from a relevant article is frequently worth more.
Why does it strip the www prefix?
So example.com and www.example.com count as one domain rather than two. They are almost always the same site, and separating them would split the counts misleadingly.
Does it handle domains like example.co.uk correctly?
Yes. The full hostname is preserved rather than truncated at the last two segments, so country-code domains with second-level suffixes are extracted correctly.
Should I deduplicate before extracting domains?
Yes, if the list may contain repeats. A URL appearing three times inflates its domain's count without adding information, which distorts the ranking.