Google is, as we know, the most used search engine in the UK and almost all other developed countries. Users can (and do) use it to find out information on almost anything, but what is not commonly known is that Google search is not limited to purely entering a sentence or keyword in order to find what we are looking for. By using ‘search operators’ results can be tailored to meet informational requirements or needs. Specifically, search operators can provide an SEO practitioner with incredibly useful campaign data.
Most SEO practitioners already use a search operator when performing a quoted search, i.e. “Chris Pitt” as opposed to Chris Pitt. This search will return only those webpages that have the exact term “Chris Pitt” on the page and so can be useful to understand the competitive use of a potential keyword. Search operators can do so much more though.
The search operators commonly used for SEO are:
| Search operator | Use | Example |
| allinanchor: | returns pages that have links pointing to them that us the anchor text you define. For example, ‘allinanchor: Chris Pitt’ will return pages that are linked to from other pages using anchor text that includes the words ‘Chris’ and ‘Pitt’ | allinanchor:Chris Pitt |
| allintext: | returns pages that contain the all of the words within the keyword, but not necessarily in order or combination. The search allintext: Chris Pitt would return pages containing the sentence “I know Chris Pitt”, “I know Chris, he is a Pitt” and also “Brad Pitt reminds me of Chris?” | allintext:Chris Pitt |
| allintitle: | returns webpages that have the defined keyword in the browsertags. | allintitle:Chris Pitt |
| allinurl: | returns webpages that have the defined keywords in the url. allinurl: Chris Pitt would return only those webpages who have the words ‘Chris’ and ‘Pitt’ in the title. | allinurl:Chris Pitt |
| cache: | Combining the ‘cache:’ search operator with a URL will return Google’s cached version of a page. | cache:bbc.co.uk |
| filetype: | By utilising the ‘filetype:’ operator you are telling Google to only return results that include a specific file type | filetype:pdf |
| inanchor: | This search term is similar but not identical to allinanchor: allinanchor: returns all terms after the search operator, whereas inachor: will return only the first word after the search operator. | inanchor:Chris |
| intext: | is similar to allintext: but it only considers the first word immediately after the search operator. | intext:Chris |
| intitle: | is similar to allintitle: but it only considers the first word immediately after the search operator. | intitle:Chris |
| inurl: | is similar to allintitle: but it only considers the first word immediately after the search operator. | inurl:chris |
| link: | returns all webpages that have a link that contains that domain and is great for identifying competitor backlinks. A search for site:chrispitt.com would show every webpage that links to chrispitt.com | link:bbc.co.uk |
| related: | returns all sites that are related to or share common themes with the identifying site | related:bbc.co.uk |
| site: | returns all the pages that Google has indexed for that site and is useful for making sure that your pages are being indexed. | site:bbc.co.uk |
The great thing about search operators is that many of them can be used in combination with each other. Many of the popular SEO tools out there are using search operators as a base function of their software, such as tools offering backlink analysis.
With that in mind, my next blog post will be about how to use search operator combinations to find link opportunities.
Awesome list of Google search operators Chris. My favorite is the site operator which gets used when site search fails from within a website and I have to go back to Google to find something from a site that I am on. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Rick
Thanks for the nice comment. I like to use the site: search too, but get most enjoyment from combining searches. I am going to be writing more on this over he next week or so. It would be great to hear your thoughts on those blogs.
Speak soon and thanks again!
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