Google search is a powerful tool on its own. You can search for anything on Google, but do you know that you can use specific search tricks to find more specific results?
Google search operators are a powerful way to improve your search engine marketing. If you use the right search operator, your searches will be more efficient and accurate.
Google search operators that are more advanced can give you a lot of useful information that can help with things like auditing your SEO, coming up with a content strategy, researching keywords, and more.
This guide contains information about Google’s main advanced search operators to help you take advantage of them.
What are Google search operators?
Operators allow you to specify exactly what you want to search for in a Google search. They can be very helpful in narrowing down your results to find exactly what you’re looking for.
To use a search operator, type it into the Google search box like you would if you were doing a text search.
Make your results much more specific
If you use advanced Google search operators, you will get much more specific results. Let’s say you search “SEO” on Google right now. You will get more than 730 million results!
If you use the allintitle operator, you will only be presented with results that have “SEO” specifically in the page title. This will reduce the number of results to 14.6 million.
Use advanced Google search operators to take your business to the next level
With search operators, you can:
- Find content and link building opportunities.
- Find SEO issues, such as glaring indexing errors.
- Find research and statistics to improve your content.
- Efficiently gauge how competitive certain long-tail keywords are.
Search operator rules to follow
There are two important ‘rules’ to follow when refining web searches:
- If punctuation is not part of the search operator, Google will usually ignore it.
- Avoid spaces between your symbol or word command and your search term. For example,
site:movingtrafficmedia.comwill work, however,site: movingtrafficmedia.comwill not work.
The best advanced Google search operators
Once you know how to use Google search operators, it becomes much easier to find what you’re looking for online. You will be amazed at how much easier your life will be once you have mastered these commands.
1. site:
This operator allows you to search for content that is hosted on a certain domain.
If you want to search for something on specific websites, like Wikipedia or YouTube, you can use “site:wikipedia.org” or “site:youtube.com” to do so.
site: command use case
There are many use cases for this particular command. A common way to estimate the size of a website is to see how many pages Google has indexed for that domain.
2. cache:
The cache: operator allows you to find the most recent cached version of a certain web page.
cache: command use case
The command will show you if and when Google has crawled new changes that you have recently made to your content or design.
3. related:
The search operator “related:” can be used to find websites that are related to the site in question. The only effective way to use this is for large domains, such as nytimes.com or searchengineland.com as shown in the image.
related: command use case
If you want to see how Google categorizes your site and the competition, use the related: command. This will give you an illuminating look into how Google views your site and the competition.
This makes it valuable to do a competitive analysis to understand who your online competitors are, which might be different from the competition you face offline.
4. inanchor:
Anchor text is the visible text on a page that links to another page. This Google search operator allows you to find pages that contain inbound links with the specified anchor text.
The search results returned will display any pages with anchor text that includes the word ‘jon’ or the word ‘clark’.
Although you cannot expect to get accurate results on a global scale, the data that is sampled can give you a good idea of what to expect.
inanchor: command use case
This command is helpful for when you want to check how many links a website has, or for competitive link audits.
5. allinanchor:
This command looks for pages that include all of the words in the inbound anchor text.
For example, if you type in “jon clark” you will get 991,000 results.
6. inurl:
The inurl: is the Google search operator to use.
inurl: command use case
This search command is extremely helpful for:
- Diagnosing indexing issues (
inurl:tagto identify indexed blog tag pages). - Content inspiration across topics you are researching.
- Identifying guest posting opportunities (
inurl:guest-post).
7. allinurl:
This Google search operator will only return results that include all of the defined words in the URL.
8. intitle:
The “this” operator allows you to find results that are more targeted for certain search words or phrases. If you were to Google the terms in the image above, more than 27,200,000 results would be returned that include at least one of those terms in the page title.
intitle: command use case
This search function is great for finding guest posting opportunities and checking how competitive keywords are based on the number of results returned for a word.
9. allintitle:
The allintitle: command will return results that contain all the words in the page’s title.
For instance, the results that comprise all of the words “write for us” have been deeper honed from 27,200,000 to 163,000.
10. intext:
Looking for a specific word or phrase somewhere in the content? The intext: operator allows you to find terms that appear anywhere on a website page, from the page title to the page’s content.
intext: command use case
This command can be used to find opportunities for link building. The image above shows that there are more than 522,000,000 pages with the terms “sponsored” or “post.”
The following advanced search operators will help us further refine these results.
11. allintext:
This operator will help you find pages that include all the terms you are searching for in the text of the page.
Changing the search operator from intext: to allintext: removes nearly 200 million results.
This operator only looks for instances of the specified word on the page, regardless of proximity to other words. In other words, the words may be far apart from each other in a sentence.
12. Filetype
You can use the “filetype:” operator to do a search on a specific file type The “filetype:” operator allows you to search for images that only fall under a specific file type.
This can help if you need to narrow down your research on infographics or memes, or if you just want to see some images.
Google can help you find images and other files that might have been uploaded without you knowing.
Example:
site:domainname.com filetype:txt – inurl:robots.txt
To exclude robots.txt from appearing in your search results, use the filetype search operator. This will help you find files on your site that were indexed by Google.
13. Around()
Do you want your results to be very specific?
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.
Example use:
digital drawing AROUND(2) tools
Advanced Google Search Commands
1. Or
The “OR” command allows you to search for pages that include either word.
You can use this command if you want to find the words “drawing” or “painting”, but not both.
Example:
digital drawing OR digital painting
2. Add words: (+)
If you want to include specific words in your search results, you can use a plus sign before each word.
Example:
“content marketing + SEO”
Putting It All Together: How to Use These Commands & Operators in the Real World
It can be difficult to know which combinations of search commands and operators will be most effective in helping you achieve your goal.
Here are some more ideas of how to use these operators to their full potential for a variety of SEO purposes.
These ideas can help you improve your SEO projects.
Dig Deeper Into Website Content Research
You can use these search operators to find specific content when you are researching.
You will find the latest information on SEO as well as articles on how to make an amazing bacon potato volcano with cheese.
If you are looking for content ideas, you can use these operators to help you find what you need.
Exclude Specific Terms That Aren’t Helpful to You
Example:
term1 -term2
If you were researching SEO content about secure URLs, you could exclude anything that mentioned 404 errors.
The following would suffice:
secure URLs -404 errors
Exclude More Than One Term
Example:
term1 -term2 -term3 -term4
If your content research revolves around 404 errors but all you want are pages that talk about them (and pages that do not mention 404 errors for canonicals, 500 errors, and the like), you can use this combination:
secure urls -404 errors -canonicals -500 errors
Exclude Exact Terms
If you want to find pages that mention technical SEO audits but do not mention 404 errors or XML sitemaps in the discussion, you can use this operator.
Except for XML sitemap, everything else will be included.
Example:
technical seo -“404 errors” -“xml sitemaps”
Exclude Irrelevant Sites
There may be times when you want to specifically exclude certain websites from your search results.
You can use the “site:” command to remove an entire site from the index.
Example:
Tech seo -site:pinterest.com
Technical SEO Audits
Technical SEO audits can be complex, containing over 200 factors to consider fixing, especially for large websites. When done correctly, they can provide a comprehensive view of a website’s health and performance.
There is more to presenting the results of a tool than simply spitting out the information and sending it to the client or boss.
Anybody can do that.
SEO professionals create custom strategies that prioritize SEO tasks to help a client’s site improve.
A technical SEO audit can help identify areas where your website needs improvement in order to rank higher in search engine results.
You can use advanced search operators to get more specific information from Google about how it sees and indexes a website.
Try using the following Google Search operators in your next SEO audit:
Identify How a Site is Indexed
Example:
site:domainname.com
This text provides insight into how Google indexes websites, which can be useful for adjusting SEO strategies.
One way to determine how many pages are in Google’s index for a given site is to use the “site:” operator. This will also give you an idea of the site’s index count.
The index result count can help you find technical errors on a big website.
A site may have only 270 pages, but if Google is indexing 15,000 pages from the site, it means that Google has found additional pages on the site beyond the 270 pages that exist.
This can include things like pages that are generated incorrectly from on-site search, problems that come up from transitioning from http:// to https://, and redirects that don’t work correctly.
Remove Multiple Subdomains
Example:
site:domainname.com -inurl:stage -inurl:dev -inurl:staging
If you manage a large, messy website for a multinational brand that often has problems with its staging site being indexed, but you’re not concerned about the staging site, this operator can help you exclude all those messy staging site subdomains.
Drill Deep Down Into Non-Secure Pages and Audit Your http:// to https:// Transition
Example:
site:domanname.com -inurl:https
The plus sign in front of https:// indicates that you want to include that URL, while the minus sign in front of it indicates that you want to exclude it.
The operator can help you keep track of your progress in switching from http:// to https://.
This gives you an idea of how Google is indexing your new pages with https:// as opposed to their pages with http://.
Finding Duplicate Content
Example:
site:domainname.com “content search term”
If you want to know how much internal duplicate content a website has, you can check how much of it is being indexed by Google.
The use of these operators in combination will help you to do this.
The number of results returned by a search term can give you a quick overview of how popular the term is.
If you discover that your website has duplicate content issues, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog to further investigate which pages are causing problems.
Multiple Combinations of Operators Can Be Your Friend
There are many different ways you can use operators to audit your content, from checking for plagiarism to auditing your transition from http to https.
Try to find combinations of words that will be most helpful in your search.
Use Google’s search tools to find out what information is most important to help you beat your competition in the search results.
