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Cache
Using the cache operator, you can find out what the most recent
cache of a specified webpage is. This is useful for identifying when
a page was last crawled.
Example use:
cache:websitename.com
Allintext
This operator will help you find whether all the terms that you are
looking for shows up in the text of that page. This operator,
however, isn’t pin-accurate because it won’t look for text on the
page that appears close together.
Example use:
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5/9/2020 Every Advanced Google Search Operator You Need to Know
Intext
This operator is a more global operator that allows you to find any
terms showing up on a webpage in any area – like the title, the
page itself, the URL, and elsewhere. This is useful if you want to
perform research into how others’ on-page SEO footprints are being
categorized by Google.
Example use:
Inposttitle
If you are performing blog research, this operator is useful for
finding blogs with certain search terms in the blog title.
Example use:
Allintitle
This search operator is a great way to find blogs that match the
content you are writing about. For example, you could
use allintitle to research what others are doing for that particular
topic. Then, you could write your post to be better than theirs.
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Example use:
Intitle
This is a narrower operator that will help you find more targeted
results for specific search phrases. If you wanted to find pages that
are all about “drawing with micron pens” for example, the following
is how you would use it:
Example use:
Allinurl
This one allows you to find pages with your requested search terms
within the URL in internal search pages. For example, say you
wanted to perform research on pages on a site that had the terms
“drawing tablet”. You would use the following:
Example use:
This will bring up all internal URLs on Amazon.com that have the
terms “drawing tablet”.
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Inurl
If you wanted to find pages on a site that has your targeted search
term in the URL, and the second term in content on a website, you
could use this operator. This is useful for finding sites with strong
on-page optimization for the topics you are researching.
Example use:
inurl:drawing portraits
Allinanchor
This operator is useful for performing research on pages that have
all terms after “inanchor:” in anchor text linking back to the page.
Using this operator can help you find
Example use:
Inanchor
It is possible to identify pages with inbound links that contain the
anchor text specified. However, data is only sampled and doesn’t
provide accurate global results.
Example use:
inanchor:"digital painting"
Filetype
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Do you want to find images that only fall under a specific file type
(e.g., .jpg, .png, or .gif)? This is a great way to narrow research on
infographics or memes. But, it can also help you identify stray
images and other files (like PDFs) that may have been picked up by
Google.
Example use:
This will help you find files on your site that were indexed by Google
but will exclude robots.txt from appearing in the search results.
Around()
Do you want to narrow the focus of your results to be super narrow?
This is a great way to identify search results where two or more
terms appear on the page, and also appear very close to each other
(denoted by the number in the parentheses).
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Example use:
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Example use:
Quotes (“word”)
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Using quotes around the phrases you are searching for will help you
find results that are exact match results, rather than the broad
results you will get with standard search.
Example use:
“search term 1”
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Example use:
Example use:
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Site:
If you are in need of more specific results that are catered to a
single website, this command will help you bring those results up.
For example, if you wanted to search your favorite SEO website for
articles on 404 errors, you would use the following:
Example use:
Related:
If you’re in a situation where you need any results that have more
than one website with similar content to a site you are familiar with,
just use the following:
Example use:
“related:domainname.com”
Info:
This one will help you find information related to the domain that
you are searching. It will help you identify things like pages with the
domain text on-page (not necessarily linked), similar on-site pages,
and the website’s cache.
Example use:
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"info:domainname.com"
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It’s not really cheating. You’re getting that edge you need to beat
your competition.
Below are a few ideas that you can use to take these operators and
use them to their fullest potential for a wide variety of SEO uses.
Feel free to use them to build your own SEO ideas and projects.
term1 -term2
Say you were doing research for SEO content that talks about
secure URLs, but you wanted to exclude anything that mentioned
404 errors. Because, for your purposes, 404 errors won’t help you.
The following would suffice:
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If your content research revolved around 404 errors, but all you
want are pages that talk about 404 errors (and pages that do not
mention 404 errors for canonicals, 500 errors, and the like), you can
use this combination:
Example use:
Example use:
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Any SEO professional who is worth their salt, however, will put
together a custom strategy the client can use to prioritize SEO tasks
and get their site from where it is to where it needs to be. That’s
where the power of a technical SEO audit comes in.
Using advanced search operators can help you drill down to the
nitty-gritty details of how Google sees and indexes a website.
Without further ado, below are some ideas to get you started toward
expanding your use of these operators.
site:domainname.com
A tiny window into how a site is indexed by Google can tell you so
much about how to tailor your SEO efforts accordingly. Using
the site: operator is one of the simpler ways to do this, and you can
get an idea of the site’s index count as well.
The index result count can help you identify massive technical
errors on a large website. Say, for example, a site physically only
has 270 pages but Google is indexing 15,000 pages from the site.
This could range from incorrectly generated pages from on-site
search, to issues arising from an http:// to https:// transition, and
redirects not working properly.
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site:domanname.com -inurl:https
This example use excludes the https:// url, but you can also include
it by removing the minus sign. Using the operator in this way can
help you audit your http:// to https:// transition. This will give you an
idea into how Google is indexing your new https:// pages as
opposed to their http:// pages.
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Say you wanted to find out how much a website’s internal duplicate
content was being indexed by Google. The combination of these
operators will help you do this.
This is useful for gaining a surface insight into how many results are
returned by the search term. After finding this out, you can use a
tool like Screaming Frog to really dig deeper and find those
duplicate content pages that are presenting problems.
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