Advanced Search Query (Search Operators)

What is Advanced Search Query (Search Operators)?

Advanced search queries use special commands, known as search operators, to make Google provide a far more specific set of results than what would usually be expected.

For instance, instead of typing out a phrase and sifting through masses of results, you can tell Google exactly what you want to include, exclude, or look for and where. For anyone focusing on SEO or link building, advanced search queries are one of the most functional free tools to make use of.

In terms of its importance to link building, it’s difficult to overstate just how powerful advanced search queries are. For instance, if you’re looking to identify relevant industry websites that accept guest posts, running a query like your topic “write for us” can present pages that are actively searching for contributions.

Likewise, if you’re looking for a resource page that could be open to linking to your content, searching for your topic intitle:resources can help to quickly identify the best prospects.

This process can also be adapted to identify sites that mention competitors, and running a search for each competitor’s name across relevant sites can put you in touch with the right websites for your SEO needs. As a result, these advanced queries can save hours of manual searching on Google.

Advanced Search Queries to Remember

Different prompts can work wonders when refining your search, and some key processes to keep in mind include:

• “”: Quotation marks force search engines to run an exact-match search
• site: This restricts search results to a single domain, which can come in handy for exploring what Google has indexed from your own website or conducting competitor research.
• intitle: and inurl: These prompts help you to look for words specifically in page titles or URLs.
• -: The minus symbol excludes terms from search results, and combining them, for instance, site:example.com -inurl:blog, can help you to slice results in more practical ways.

You can also stack these query types together to create far more precise results through Google searches.

Website Diagnostics

While advanced search queries are widely used for link building, they can also be highly effective for diagnosing your own pages.

Running a site:yourdomain.com search provides a rough impression of how many of your pages have been indexed by Google. Scanning those results can reveal important pages that you may have forgotten about.

This form of site audit can also help you to uncover duplicate content or sections of your site that shouldn’t be public.

Best of all, this process is quick, free, and offers a comprehensive insight into the quality of your SEO output through the eyes of your leads.

However, while this approach is good for SEO insights, there are some limitations to keep in mind. For instance, the page counts Google displays for a site: search are estimates, so treating them as precise could leave you with the wrong impression.

Google has also been known to change how advanced queries behave, meaning that results can be wildly different depending on when a search takes place. Despite this, there are few better ways for website owners to conduct fast and flexible research on both their own sites and those of their rivals.