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Google Commands for SEO

By Mark on Apr 18, 2008 in Google, LinuxToday, LinuxWorld, SEO

When you optimize your website for the Google search it’s helpful to see things the way Google does. That we you can measure results and identify other sites that are being successful in your niche. The following commands can be entered into a Google search to return information useful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specific to Google.

allinanchor:keyword(s) - Shows anchor text with all specified keywords. Anchor text is visible part of a hyperlink for example in the code <a href=”http://www.socializedsoftware.com”>SocializedSoftware.com</a> the anchor text is SocializedSoftware.com.
allintitle:keyword - Shows results for pages with a specified keywords in the the title. For example looking for the pages that include the following words: open source blog would be executed by typing the following in the Google search bar: allintitle:open source blog
allinurl:keyword - Works the same as allintitle but shows all pages with the specified keywords in the URL
cache:www.yourwebpage.com - Shows the cached version of a webpage. If you choose not to have Google cache a web page you can add the following to your web page header: <META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”/>
link:www.yourwebpage.com - List sites that link to a web page
related:keyword - Shows all sites ranking for a specified keyword
info:www.yourdomain.com - Shows the following information for a site:
site:www.yourdomain.com - Shows all the pages that Google includes in its index for a givendomain
intitle:keyword - Shows top results for pages with the specified keyword in the title
inurl:keyword - Shows results for pages with specified keywords in URL

Beyond SEO you can use these commands to help you find pages and other resources that are related to pages you already know and like. For example, if you like ESPN Baseball you might search for

related:http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/index

Which would bring you to the Major League Baseball home page or Yahoo! Sports page for baseball. Whether you are a SEO professional or a web surfer there are a bunch of ways to use Google other than the plain vanilla search.

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