Google has become an extremely powerful, sophisticated search engine. It also gets the vast majority of search performed online, making it the most important search engine to focus on for SEOs.
And to make it easier for SEOs to use Google better to do their research and find link building opportunities, we will discuss some useful search operators in this article.
Basic Search Operators
Site: Simply searching for “site:xyz.com” will get you all the results from that particular site.
Link:If you want to find all the pages linking to a particular site, you can use this search operator to do so. For example, you can search for “link:YouTube.com” if you want to find all sites linking to YouTube.com.
Related:If you want to find all sites that are related to a particular site, you can do so using this search operator. This means that searching for “related:YouTube.com” will help you find all sites that are similar to YouTube.com.
OR: You can use this search operator to find all webpages that talk about either of two things you’re looking for. To put it better, if you search for “SEO OR PPC”, then you will find all pages that talk either about SEO or PPC.
Info: This particular search operator helps you find a lot of useful information about a particular site, such as its cached version, related pages, and other useful information.
Advanced Search Operators
Allinanchor:If you want to find sites that link to another website using a particular anchor text, then this is the search operator you would want to use. Example: Searching for “allinanchor:Best SEO company” will allow you to find and check all pages that are linking to a website using the words “best SEO company” as the anchor text.
Allintext: If you want to find pages that have some specific words mentioned on them, then you simply need to perform a search for those words by putting “allintext” before it. An example would be “allintext:SEO checklist”.
Allintitle:This one works in a similar way to allintext, but just limits itself to the title.
AllinURL: Again, if you want to find pages that have some specific words in them, then this search operator allows you to do that. Example: AllinURL:Google FAQ.
Author:You can use this search operator if you want to find Google newsgroup articles that have been written by a particular author. For example, you can search for “author:randfishkin” if you want to find all Google newsgroup articles written by him.
You can also make the results more specific by including a particular word related to what you’re looking for, such as “SEO author:rand@moz.com”.
Define:This works in a similar way to the above search operator, but is used to find definitions for different terms. So if you want to find what a blog is defined is, you need to search for “define:blog” in Google.
Finally, a more general version of the search operators “allintext” and “allintitle” is “intext” and “intitle”, as they allow to find pages that talk about some particular words anywhere on their page, and not necessarily mention them together.
