Top 9 Google Search Tricks

Posted on November 14, 2008
Filed Under SEO |

Millions upon millions of people use Google as their search engine of choice everyday to do searches. But Google has so much more to offer when it comes to just the basic web search. Here are some top Google search tricks to help you in your SEO efforts (and then some).

ALLINANCHOR

What it does: the allinanchor operator within a Google search will find all of the keywords you’re searching on within the anchor text of any web page. As an example, if we use the operator allinanchor:baby bottles Google will find all web pages that have links on them that contain the term “baby” or “bottles”.

allinanchor:baby bottles

ALLINTEXT

What it does: The allintext operator within a Google search will find all web pages that have all of the terms you searched on within the web page’s text.

For example, if we decided we wanted to find only those web pages that had the terms “baby”, “bottles”, “diapers” and “newborn” on it, we would query Google like so:

allintext:baby bottles diapers newborn

INTITLE

The intitle Google search operator allows you to find only those web pages that have the word or phrase you searched on within its title.

intitle:cakes

Would return web pages that had the term “cakes” in their title.

If instead you’d like to find those web pages that had a phrase in their title (more than one keyword), you can use the following allintitle operator which is covered next.

ALLINTITLE

The allintitle operator when doing a Google search allows you to search only those web pages that have the search phrase contained within the title.

For example, if you’d like to find out how many websites are not optimizing their title tags and have used the default “Untitled document” within their web page’s titles, you’d simply enter the following into the Google search box:

allintitle:”Untitled Document”

This is also helpful if you’re scoping out your competition and would like to know if a competitor has not used their title tag properly. For example, let’s say that your competitor is Starbucks and you’d like to see if they have not used any of their title tags properly.

You’d enter the following into a Google search page:

allintitle:”Untitled Document” site:starbucks.com

Which brings us to the site operator.

SITE

Google’s site: operator allows you to search Google’s index for a website. This is helpful if you aren’t sure if your brand new website has yet been indexed by Google or you want to see how many of your web pages are in Google’s index.

site:YourSite.com

Notice that we leave off the “www” and the http:// portion of the website address. This will allow Google to pull all instances of the site regardless of if it found a “www” version or simply a http:// version.

INANCHOR

Google’s inanchor search operator allows you to search for web pages that have a specific word or phrase within their anchor text (the text that links to another page) like so:

Babies inanchor :bottle - will return all web pages that contain the word “babies” AND have the phrase “bottle” within their anchor text.

We can also use this in conjunction with the site operator as we did above. So let’s say that we’d like to see what web pages that http://www.coffee.org has that have the word “coffee” in their anchor text. We’d simply enter in the search query like so:

inanchor:coffee site:coffee.org

INURL

The inurl operator allows you to find those web pages that have that word you’re searching on in their url or web site address.

For example, if we placed the following in the Google search box:

inurl:computer

Google would return all of the websites that had the word “computer” in their website address.

If instead you wanted to find a phrase and not just a single word within a website’s address or URL, you’d then use the allinurl operator covered below:

ALLINURL

The allinurl operator allows you to find websites that have key phrases within their website address or URL. For example, if we wanted to find all the websites that had the phrase “computer parts” in their URL or website address, we’d enter the following into the Google search box:

allinurl:computer parts

Keep in mind that both the inurl and the allinurl will find websites that not only have those words or phrases contained within their actual URL such as http://www.SomeSite.com but that also have used that word or phrase in a directory off of their main site.

So in a search for computer parts you might see the following:

computerlabkids.com/parts.htm

LINK

The link operator allows you to find websites that are linking to a certain website. So if you wanted to see who was linking to HouseOfQuilts.com you would enter the following into the Google search box:

link:houseofquilts.com

Note that Google does not reveal to you all of the links pointing to any one website. Instead for SEO purposes, I recommend http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com who will give you the first 1,000 links coming into any one website. And we cover this extensively in our BoneheadSEO.com SEO training classes.

These are just a few of many different search operators that Google offers when doing a search. However, these are the ones that you’ll find most important when doing your SEO research so keep this list handy and make reference to it whenever you can.

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