In this article we will talk about how you can use search operators to get important information related to your SEO as well as find great link building opportunities. While the infographic is pretty much self-explanatory, we will explain things in a bit more detail below.
Basic Search Operators
Site: The “Site” search operator allows you to restrict the results you get to a particular site only. So a search for “site:SEOoptimizers.com” will only return pages from SEOoptimizers.com.
Link: This can be a very useful search operator as it can help you find the sites or pages that are linking to a particular site. So for instance, searching for “link:YouTube.com” will help you find all pages that are linking out to YouTube.com.
Related: This can again be a useful search operator for getting a better idea about your competitors. It pulls up sites related to the one you use in the search query.
For an example, searching for “related:YouTube.com” will help you find sites that are similar to YouTube.com.
OR: The “OR” search operator helps you find pages that are talking about one of the two things you may be interested in. So for an example, searching for “SEO OR PPC” will pull up results that are either talking about SEO or PPC.
Info: This search query finds you a lot of useful information about a site, including its cached version. If you perform a search for “info:Google.com,” you will get to know a lot of rather technical stuff about it.
Cache: This search query basically helps you see how a particular page looked like when it was last crawled by Google. For example: Cache:instagram.com to get all the data about Instagram’s social media platform.
Advanced Search Operators
Allinanchor: Used to find the sites that are linking out to another site using a particular anchor text. Example: “Allinanchor: Best SEO Company” will find you pages that are linking to another site using the words “Best,” “SEO,” and “Company.”
Allintext: Helps you search for pages that include a particular text or words in their content. Example: “Allintext: SEO checklist” will find you pages that have the words “SEO” and “Checklist” in their content.
Allintitle: Same as the above one but it searches for the title than the text of the page. Example: “Allintitle: detect plagiarism” will return results that have the words “detect” and “plagiarism” in their title.
Allinurl: Again, same as above, but it deals with the URL of the page than the title or the content. So for instance, searching for “allinurl: Google FAQ” will help you find all pages that have the words “Google” and “FAQ” in their URL.
Finally, while these search operators are some of the most important ones, the others that are listed in the infographic can be pretty useful as well.
