In Open Site Explorer is it possible to use wildcards?

[SimonCh]

If I have a section on my website called lists with articles in there can I use wildcards in Open Site Explorer to find how many backlinks all articles in that section have - and ideally which pages are most linked to?

Something like www.example.com/lists/* to give number of backlinks to all articles in that website section and which are the most highly linked to.

Would be a great feature to have!

Cheers

Siimon

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi Simon,

In a nutshell, no you cannot use wildcards in OSE.

There is also no need to use regex. You can easily see what you want by selecting the 'Top Pages' tab, which shows a list of your pages and how many links are pointing to each page.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

[SimonCh]

Hi Adam and thanks for the answer. However, I'm after the total number of backlinks to all pages within a website section. I have over 5,000 pages in that section and I would like to know the most linked to.

It's not practical to do a search for each of those pages one-by-one.

Cheers

Simon

PS. Sorry where did the Regex mention come from?

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi Simon,

You are actually talking about regex (or regular expressions) here in terms of matching. Using wildcards is a part of regex. If you are unfamiliar with regex then you can read about it here.

Also to reiterate, you can still find what you are looking for within the 'Top Pages' section of OSE. It lists all subfolders (or website section as you put it) along with the individual pages contained within these sections. A tip would be to sort the Page Title URLs by page authority (descending) as the more important sections are likely to be listed before the individual pages within each section. However, this is not always the case. To make it easier to find exactly what you want then just download the CSV and you can sort and/or find the data you need within Excel very easily.

Adam.