This is one of those small tasks that quietly eats an afternoon. Someone hands you a spreadsheet with a LinkedIn column in five different formats. A colleague forwards an email chain with a dozen profile links buried in signatures. You export from two tools on different days and need to know how much they overlap.
None of it is difficult. All of it is tedious, and doing it by hand in a spreadsheet reliably produces duplicates you will not notice until someone receives your message twice.
Where this problem comes up
- Inherited lists. A spreadsheet from a previous agency or a departing colleague, with the LinkedIn column filled in inconsistently over months by different people.
- Email threads. Introductions and referrals arrive with profile links in signatures and replies. The useful data is scattered through prose.
- Overlap checks. You have two exports and want to know how many people appear in both before you import either.
- Event and conference pages. Speaker and attendee sections often list profiles directly in the page.
What a profile URL is made of
A LinkedIn personal profile URL has three meaningful parts: the host, the path prefix /in/, and the public identifier that follows it. That identifier is the only part that actually identifies the person. Everything else is decoration that varies by who copied the link and from where.
This is the key insight for deduplicating. If you reduce every URL to its public identifier and compare those, duplicates collapse correctly. If you compare the full strings, they do not.
The four ways one person becomes four rows
Tracking parameters. A URL copied from a search result or an email often carries a query string after a question mark, such as an originalSubdomain value or a tracking identifier. Two links to the same person with different parameters are different strings.
Locale subdomains. The same profile is fr.linkedin.com to a French viewer, uk.linkedin.com to a British one and www.linkedin.com to everyone else. Three hosts, one person.
Protocol and www. Some sources give the full https prefix, others start at linkedin.com, others include www and others do not. All the same profile.
Trailing slashes. A single trailing character makes two otherwise identical strings unequal to any naive comparison, including a spreadsheet's remove-duplicates function.
Strip all four and what remains is the identifier. That is your dedupe key, and it is the reason a spreadsheet alone cannot do this job properly.
People versus company pages
LinkedIn uses different path prefixes for different object types. Personal profiles use /in/. Companies use /company/. Schools use /school/ and groups use /groups/.
Only the first is a person. Mixing company pages into a list of people is a common and quietly expensive mistake, because a connection request sent to a company page goes nowhere and you will not get an error telling you so. Any extraction worth using separates them rather than silently dropping them, so you can see what was filtered out.
How to extract them cleanly
Paste whatever you have into the free LinkedIn Profile URL Extractor. It scans the text for every LinkedIn URL, normalises away all four variations above, deduplicates on the identifier, shows you how many duplicates it removed, separates company pages into their own box, and lets you copy the result or download it as CSV.
It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored and there is no account. That matters when the text you are pasting is a client list or an internal email thread.
The limitation nobody mentions
A clean list of profile URLs is not a prospect list. It is a list of addresses. There is no name in a URL, no headline, no job title, no company and no location. If your goal is outreach you can actually personalise, a column of links gets you perhaps a tenth of the way.
Filling in the rest by hand means opening every profile and copying fields one at a time, which is precisely the work nobody has time for. The alternative is to extract the profiles rather than the links: run the LinkedIn search, import the results, and get first name, last name, headline, job title, location and profile URL already populated and deduplicated in one pass.
Use the URL extractor when you have inherited a mess and need it tidy. Use the extension when you are building a list from scratch, because starting from the profiles skips the cleanup entirely.
Skip the cleanup next time.
Extract profiles instead of links and every field arrives populated. 100 free leads on signup, no card, credits never expire.
Start freeFAQ
What makes a LinkedIn URL a personal profile?
The path segment. Personal profiles use /in/ followed by the public identifier. Company pages use /company/, schools use /school/ and groups use /groups/. Only /in/ URLs are people.
Why does deduplicating by exact text fail?
Because the same profile is written several ways: with and without https, with or without www, on a locale subdomain such as fr.linkedin.com, with a trailing slash, or carrying tracking parameters after a question mark. All of those are one person, and exact matching treats them as five.
Does a profile URL contain the person's name or job title?
No. A URL is an address, not a record. It carries no name, headline, job title, company or location. To get those fields you need to extract the profiles themselves.
Is my pasted text uploaded anywhere?
Not with our tool. The extraction runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript, nothing is sent to a server, and no account is required.
Can I paste a whole spreadsheet column?
Yes. Copy the cells and paste them in. The surrounding columns are ignored and only the LinkedIn URLs are returned.