If you’ve ever wondered whether you can find technical information about your site, quickly and easily, without paying anyone to do it, the answer is yes! Google supports several Advanced Search Operators which can provide you with important site info from your search bar whenever you desire.
In your browser search bar, use these search operators -
site: Google restricts the results to those websites in the domain you enter. For instance, [FAQ site:www.mightymerchant.com] will find pages with the term FAQ only within www.mightymerchant.com. The search [FAQ site:com] returns pages with the term FAQ within all .com URLs. With all of these search operators, there can be no space between the colon and the domain.
link: Returns pages that link to your site – very helpful in determining the type and quality of incoming links you have. You may discover sites linking to you that you were not aware of. Enter your domain after the colon with no space. This can also be used to find the links of your competitors.
cache: Returns the current cache of your home page. There are two ways to utilize this. The operator [cache:www.yourdomain.com] will show the version of your home page that Google has in its cache. If you include other words in the query Google will highlight those words within the cached document. For instance, [cache:www.yourdomain.com soccer] will show the cached content with the word “soccer” highlighted.
info: Returns the description Google has of your site.
related: Returns pages that are similar to your site – very helpful when you embark on a link-building campaign.
allintitle: followed by your search words (with no space) returns results with all of the search words in the title. For instance, [allintitle: FAQ Shipping] will return only documents that have both “FAQ” and “Shipping” in the title.
intitle: followed by your search words returns results with that word in the title and other words elsewhere in the document which may or may not be in the title. For instance, [intitle:FAQ Shipping] returns documents with “FAQ” in their title, and “Shipping” anywhere in the document
allinurl: followed by your search words restricts results to only those pages with those words in the URL.
inurl: Similar to allintitle: and intitle:, this returns results with the first search word in the URL but other search words elsewhere in the document and not necessarily in the URL.
Here are two other helpful search operators that can be used on Google–
define: returns definitions of whatever word is entered after, again with no space.
stocks: followed by stock ticker symbols returns results linking to stock information for those symbols.
Yahoo supports similar search operators, calling them “Search meta words.” Use these to refine your search when on Yahoo:
site: limits results to a single site. Again, no space after the colon. Find FAQ only on a certain site by typing [FAQ site:exampledomain.com]. This can also be used for .edu and .gov sites if you want to search only on academic or government sites. For instance, type library site:.edu. for results of pages containing the word library only on academic sites.
hostname: followed by search words limits results to a specific host at a site. For example, if you want to search only the usda.gov site for the word ‘nutrition,’ you could type [hostname:usda.gov nutrition]
link: Same as with Google, this meta word returns sites that link to a specific URL. Google and Yahoo define incoming links differently, so it can be helpful to check on booth engines.
linkdomain: Looks for any links to a specified domain rather than one URL. For instance, linkdomain:usda.gov returns all pages that link to http://www.usda.gov.
inURL: Use this to find sites that have a specific word within the URL. To find the MightyMerchant Blog, type inurl:mightymerchant
intitle: This returns documents with the specific word in the title.
These techniques help you target the info you receive when you search, saving you time and giving you just what you want.
