Friendly
Google Operators Every Webmaster Should Know
Friendly Google Operators Every Webmaster Should Know
There are a lot of operators (commands you can enter in the Google
search box to return specific results) you can plug into Google
in order to find what you want. For webmasters and website owners,
however, a few particular operators can be especially useful. Operators
can be used to locate potential link partners, evaluate current
inbound links, and determine what pages of your website still need
to be added to the index. Here are the operators we think you should
know:
link:
Simply enter this operator followed by your full url (including
http://) with no space. Ex: link:http://www.googleadvisor.org
This operator is one of the most popular and widely used. It simply
shows you what (and how many) webpages within the index have a link
to your url.
Using this operator, you can also plug in the url of your competitor(s)
to see what sites link to them. These websites may be a good place
to start in your search for link exchanges (or even one-way links).
site:
This operator will restrict all results to webpages within the
domain or website you enter. For example, if you enter site:googleadvisor.org
you will find all of the webpages of this site that are listed on
Google. This a good operator to use if you want to see just how
many webpages of your site Google has indexed, and likewise, how
many pages are not listed - the ones you may want to submit, or
resubmit, to Google.
allintitle:
Here you enter the operator and some keyword that you are interested
in. The results will show you websites and webpages that have that
keyword(s) in their title. For example, intitle:google will return
all sites that have google in their title, including Google Advisor.
This may be used to once again find link partners within your subject
area, and to evaluate possible competitors.
Similarly, you can also use intitle: if you want to do a similar
search, but open your results to those webpages with the keywords
in their content as well . For instance, intitle:google advisor
would give you all sites with google in the title and advisor somewhere
on the webpage.
info:
This operator is not terribly useful, but its interesting to see
what you find. Simply place your url in front of the operator like
info:www.googleadvisor.org to get a Google page with your website
title and desciption. The page will also contain links to your website's
cache, related websites (you can also use the related: operator
for this), and more.
If your website is new to the index, and you are not appearing
for any keywords yet, this is an easy way to find your website and
confirm that it is indeed listed. Note: some operators like related:
will not work for new websites.
To obtain the full list of operators, visit: http://www.google.com/help/operators.html.
We hope these few operators mentioned above will be of the most
use to you as a webmaster or website owner.
About the Author Bradley James is the
Webmaster of GoogleAdvisor.org [http://www.googleadvisor.org], an
informational site providing free information to casual searchers
and Webmasters about the Google search engine.
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