Advanced Search Techniques

One of the best tools to use for SEO is the Google search engine. It allows you to perform very specific searches on sites and for file types. Knowing how to get information out of Google should be part of every SEO specialist’s basic knowledge.

Search Operators or Query Modifiers

These are placed in front of the search term and allow you define searches for phrases that occur within a website title or in the anchor text of the site. The search allows you to do searches using the minus character to excludes certain words. Complete phrases can be added between double quotes or by slashes or dashes. Wild cards are supported, so you can search for phrases with some ambiguity.

Examples:
"Pierre Simon Laplace" – phrase search
Pierre/Simon/Laplace – phrase search
Pierre-Simon-Laplace -phrase search
Pierre-*-Laplace – searches for any phrases that matches any word between Pierre and Laplace.

Logical Modifiers

Can use +, -, OR to mean AND, NOT, OR respectively.

Example:

Max Planck -wikipedia +biography – will search for physicist max planck AND biographies but not wikipedia

Max Planck OR Maxwell -Robert – searches for Max Planck, any maxwell hopefully not Robert Maxwell.

In the following query modifiers there is no space between the modifier and the web page url.

allintitle:

searches for phrases that appear in the title.

allintitle:Maxwell’s Equations

allinanchor:

searches for pages with anchor-text in which all the searched for words appear.

Particle accelerator allinanchor:”buy it now”

inanchor:

searches for pages with one or more of the requested words appear.

inurl:

searches for pages in which one or more of the searched for words appear.

allintext:

searches for pages in which all the chosen words appear in the text.

filetype:

find results which are of a particular type. Current Google can search for documents that of the following file types:

• Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (ps)
• Lotus 1-2-3 (wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku)
• Lotus WordPro (lwp)
• MacWrite (mw)
• Microsoft Excel (xls)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt)
• Microsoft Word (doc)
• Microsoft Works (wks, wps, wdb)
• Microsoft Write (wri)
• Rich Text Format (rtf)
• Shockwave Flash (swf)
• Text (ans, txt)

~

The tilde acts as a modifier to search for synonyms.  This is also useful for finding keywords during keyword research.

site:

Gives results for all sites contained within a website. Useful for seeing what pages have been indexed by Google or if you have been banned.

cache:

The query cache:sitename will show the version of the web page that Google has in its cache.

link:

Searches through backlinks. Returns some of the backlinks.

group:

searches results in Google groups.

related:

Lists web pages that are “similar” to a specified web page. For instance, related:www.seomoz.org will list web pages that are similar to the SEO website seomoz.org .

Putting it Together

intitle:pierre-*-laplace -”victor laplace” ~mathematician -searches for any results in the title which have pierre (anything) laplace but not results with victor laplace and also include synonyms for mathematician.

It might be nice to make a useful search query that uses as many of the modifiers as possible. How many can you use and still get meaningful result?