If you are a webmaster, blogger or web developer, there are some special google search query you need to know and also add to your SEO arsenal. Not only are they special, they are very important and handy when doing SEO researches and task. They are –
Below are some SEO task and how to accomplish them using google’s special search queries.
- SERP Meta Title And Description Improvement *info:yoursite.com*
After improving your site meta title(<meta name=”title”/>) and description(<meta name=”description”/>) tag for it to rank well on search engine result page(serp), you might want to preview how it display on search engine result page. This is where info:yoursite.com special search term come in.
Practical Example
Do a search query with this term info:yousite.com e.g info:w3guy.com. You will see a preview of your site homepage meta title and description as it will appear on serp.
Note: instead of yoursite.com, you can also use a subdomain, blog post/site content full URL (e.g info:w3guy.com/adding-scroll-top-link-css-id-selector-html-link/ ). - Finding Pages Index By Google *site:yoursite.com*
Looking for your website pages or post already index by google, use site:yoursite.com. Example site:w3guy.com
You can perform the search on a whole domain or limit it to a certain subdomain or subdirectory – for example, site:w3guy.com/wordpress - See Pages Linking To Your Homepage *link:yoursite.com*
Looking for pages or site linking to your site homepage, use this search term link:yoursite.com E.g link:w3guy.com
- See Pages Similar To Your Website *related:yoursite.com*
To see pages similar or related to your website, use related: operator in your search query. E.g related:yoursite.com
- See Google’s Cache Of Your Site Page *cache:yoursite.com*
Use the cache: operator to see an archived copy of a page indexed by Google. For example, cache:w3guy.com displays the last indexed version of the Google homepage, along with information about the date the cache was created. You can also view a plain-text version of the page. This is useful because it shows how Googlebot sees the page. If you don’t want searchers to be able to access a cached version of your page, use the noarchive meta tag like this: <meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”/> The page will still be crawled and indexed by Google, but users will not see a Cached link in the search results.
Knowledge of these simple yet important Google special search query will come in handy at some point in your blogging, web developement and SEO journey.