Search Engine Commands | Google – Yahoo – Bing
How many of you use commands while searching on your favorite engine?
What Commands? – Is that what’s on your mind.
Well all popular search engines today provide some functionality to execute advanced searches and deliver more accurate results. Historically the SEO’s have used them to the fullest, even though SEO’s are relatively a new species on Internet. I would like to introduce today some popular search Commands in use today in the hope that if would assist your SEO efforts or help you find more exact search results.
Here we go
Site:domain
Example : site:www.newdelhiseo.com
Probably the most important tool on Yahoo and Google. This command returns a set of results that are the total number of pages of that particular domain currently in google index.
Please note that the results for site:www.newdelhiseo.com might drastically vary from site:newdelhiseo.com. That is dependent on which is your primary domain or rather which url google sees as primary. You can set this in the Google Webmaster Tools. Further if you have subdomains on the domain you are looking for you will see results from your sub domains when you search for the now www version. So in my example site:newdelhiseo.com you should be seeing results from our blog – blog.newdelhiseo.com.
Another point you should remember is the no of pages of results that shows down is an estimate and not factual. So a manual check of the last page should tell you how many results are actually listed.
Another enhancement to this command is site:domain/* this gives exactly the pages cached from the primary domain and removes possible duplicates too and similar urls too. Use this with particular caution.
Link:url
link:www.newdelhiseo.com
This in my opinion is the second most important command. This command returns the number of links pointing to your site. Yahoo Search is more reliable in this area. Google barely supports this command and gives you a specimen of the actual results.
In fact yahoo gives you options to find total number of links to the site (all pages included) and option to filter out internal links.
You can use this to analyze competitor back links and then get an idea how much effort is needed to beat those ranking above you on SERPs.
Related:url
This command returns pages that google considers are similar to your page url. This again is useful for competition analysis or content creation.
Allintitle:key words
Example: allintitle: net goons
Probably you have already guessed it. This command returns results that have the mentioned keywords in the page title. You can see them highlighted in the title (dark blue and bold)
Titles are the single most important on page SEO factor, so this command is pretty helpful in analyzing how far will your title changes help you gain serps.
Allinurl:key words
Example: allinurl: green apple
This is very similar to the allintitle command we say above. In this case instead of finding results from the page title it searches from the page url.