SEO Minion PAA Scraping

[Royal96]

When scraping PAA answers with SEO Minion, a lot of them look like this:

"Well, SEO stands for 'Search Engine Optimization', which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve your website's position in search results pages. Remember, the higher the website is listed, the more people will see it. 21.10.2019"

Any idea, how to filter out the date at the end using Google Sheets or Excel?

 

[BG5G]

I didn't understand where to find SEO Minion?

 

[Royal96]

I didn't understand where to find SEO Minion?

SEO Minion is a chrome extension. One of the features is scraping the People Also Asked (PAA) questions from the Google search results.

 

[dont_trust_me]

You'll need some kind of regex to remove all digits at the end. I don't know what's the implementation but someone with Excel skills could chime in.

 

[Royal96]

You'll need some kind of regex to remove all digits at the end. I don't know what's the implementation but someone with Excel skills could chime in.

Yeah, there's definitely a pattern like XX.XX.XXXX at the end. Maybe someone here knows how to do it.

 

[tiiberius]

If there is a set pattern at the end, you can replace it with special characters like ; .

In the example the pattern is: . X (...will see it. 21.10.2019)

In Notepad you can replace . X with ;. First number is the day obviously is it can only be 0, 1, 2 or 3.

#1
Paste the whole list into Notepad, one per line.

#2
Use Find & Replace function and replace all instances one by one with ;

a) find: . 0 replace with ;
b) find: . 1 replace with ;
c) find: . 2 replace with ;
d) find: . 3 replace with ;

#3
Save the file as .csv with UTF-8 encoding.

#4
Open the .csv file with Excel.

When opening, select the delimiter to be either Semicolon or Other: ;

Charset should be UTF-8

Cells should be nicely separated in preview.






Now you should have you desired list without date in the A column.

 

[M4DM4X]

This case is typically solved all over the place on stackoverflow, search for something like 'remove last x characters at the end of text line' and you'll get tons of nice scripts for sure.

 

[BlogPro]

Yeah, there's definitely a pattern like XX.XX.XXXX at the end. Maybe someone here knows how to do it.

If this is a case, you can easily resolve this in Excel by using the LEFT and LEN functions.

xx.xx.xxxx basically means 10 characters.

Our generic formula in Excel would look something like

=VALUE(LEFT(cell, LEN(cell) - n))

where n is the number of characters we're looking to trim.

So let's say you have the text

"I love BlogPro. I want to have his children. 22.10.2022"

in cell B2 of your spreadsheet - your formula would look like

=VALUE(LEFT(A3, LEN(A3) - 10))

and your text becomes

"I love BlogPro. I want to have his children."