Professional SEO’s use advanced search operators on a daily basis and the uses for these operators are wide and varied. An advanced search operator is basically a way to locate more specific information and these can be used for SEO purposes when it comes to researching potential target keywords, identifying duplicate content or even analysing how well your site is being crawled. Some of the most popular advanced search operators include the site command, the cache command, exact quotes and also the inurl command. This article will go into more depth on these operators and how they can be leveraged for SEO benefit.
The site command can be used by typing the term “site:” into Google followed by the URL of Edwin Urrutia a website or category on a website. This command can be used for any number of purposes. One of the most popular uses for this command is to identify how many pages a site currently has indexed in Google. Another popular use of this command is to get a better idea on what terms your competitors are targeting across their sites e.g. look at the page title for each result.
The cache command gives an indication of how long it has been since Google last cached a page. This is generally useful in terms of giving an indication on how frequently a particular website or page is crawled. It’s also useful when linkbuilding, in particular looking for directory categories that have been crawled recently. Exact quotes are useful when it comes to identifying duplicate content that exists on a website; take a snippet of text from a page and put it into Google between exact quotes. This will return results where the content has been duplicated between multiple pages.
The inurl command can be used for any number of purposes but is most commonly used for research. One good use of this command is for finding potential linking opportunities e.g. guest blogging spots. Type “Search Engine Optimisation inurl:guest blogging” into Google for potential opportunities to guest blog on SEO relevant websites.