Guide to Google search operators in SEO

Google Search is a powerful tool in itself. With its help, you can find practically anything. Did you know that this solution can be used to achieve specific results? If you want to improve your search marketing activities, you need to remember about advanced Google search operators. Using the right operator, Google Search will be more efficient and accurate.

Advanced Google search operators can provide important information needed for SEO audits, content strategy, keyword research, etc.

What are Google search operators?

Google search operators are special commands and symbols that extend the capabilities of standard text search. To use such an operator, simply type it directly into the Google search field (in the same way as when searching for text).

1. 01Special commandsExtend standard search.
2. 02Simple applicationType directly into the field.
3. 03Precise resultsDeliver more specific results.

Operators help narrow down Google search results precisely for better efficiency.

Make your search more specific

Advanced Google search operators deliver more specific results. For example, if you type “SEO” into Google, you will get over 730 million results. However, if the allintitle operator is used, which is one of the most advanced Google search operators, the number of results can be reduced to 14.6 million, because the results shown will have “SEO” in the page title.

Use advanced Google search operators to grow your business

Thanks to search operators, you can secure the following benefits:

• finding content and link building opportunities, 
• finding SEO issues, such as indexing errors,
• finding research and statistics that help improve content,
• effectively checking how competitive specific long-tail keywords are.

1. 01Official documentsPrecise source search.
2. 02Original illustrationsFinding unique graphics.
3. 03Link acquisitionAnalysing competitor strategies.
4. 04Excluding contentSkipping sponsored posts.

Combining operators increases search effectiveness in specific cases.

Rules to follow when using search operators

There are two important rules to follow when improving web search:

• if punctuation is not part of the search operator, Google will usually ignore it,
• avoid spaces between the symbol or word command and the search term. For example site:movingtrafficmedia.com will work, whereas site: movingtrafficmedia.com will not.

The best advanced Google search operators

Searching for different things online is much easier when you know Google search operators. Once you have mastered these commands, it is hard to imagine how you ever managed without them.

1. site:

This operator allows you to search for content located on a specific domain. So if you want to search specific sites, such as Wikipedia or YouTube, without browsing other sites, the solution is the command site:youtube.com or site:wikipedia.org. There are many ways to use this operator. The most popular is probably checking the number of pages that have been indexed by Google within a specific domain.

2. related:

This search operator can be used to find websites that are related to a given site. This solution is effective only for large domains, such as nytimes.com or searchengineland.com. The related: command is used to check how Google categorises your site and your competitors’ sites. This is valuable for competitiveness analysis, to understand who your online competitors are, who may differ significantly from your offline competitors.

3. cache:

Put simply, the operator cache: allows you to locate the most recent cached version of a specific website page. If changes have recently been made to the page content or design, this command will show whether and when Google has analysed the new changes.

4. inanchor:

This advanced Google search operator is used when we want to locate pages containing links to our site with specific anchor text. However, you should not expect to obtain global results, because only a certain sample of data is provided. This command is useful when assessing link acquisition opportunities or when auditing competitors’ links.

5. allinanchor:

This operator is based on the inanchor: command above, but it is useful when you want to search for pages containing all the words from the anchor text of a link.

6. inurl:

If you want to find a page on a website that includes a specific word (or words) in the URL, you should use the Google search operator inurl:. This command is particularly useful in the following cases:

• diagnosing indexing issues (inurl:fraza to identify indexed blog pages with a given phrase),
• looking for content inspiration on a topic being researched,
• identifying guest post opportunities (inurl:guest-post).

7. allinurl:

This advanced Google search operator takes the inurl: command a step further by returning only results that include all specified words in the URL.

8. intitle:

This is an operator that allows you to locate results that are more focused on specific words or phrases. It is an excellent solution for looking for guest post opportunities and for checking the competitiveness of keywords based on the number of results shown for a given word.

9. allintitle:

As with the operator above, the allintitle: command improves the results obtained, which include all the words contained in the page title. For example, the number of results containing all of the words “write for us” was reduced from 27 200 000 to 163 000.

10. intext:

Looking for a specific word or phrase somewhere in the text? The intext: operator allows you to locate terms appearing anywhere on the page, from the title right through to the content. This command is most often used to look for link acquisition opportunities.

11. allintext:

This operator helps streamline the search and limit it only to pages that include all the terms searched for in the page text. Changing the operator from intext: to allintext: allows you to remove almost 200 000 000 results.

This operator does not take into account the proximity of words to one another on the page. It only checks whether they appear on the page at all. This means the words do not have to form a phrase or be close to one another in the sentence.

12. filetype:

Using the filetype: operator together with a keyword makes it possible to restrict the results returned to specific file types containing the keyword. The file types that can be found are as follows:

• SWF
• KML, KMZ
• GPX
• HWP
• HTML
• PDF
• PS
• DWF
• XLS, XLSX
• ODT
• RTF
• SVG
• TEXT
• PPT, PPTX
• DOC, DOCX
• ODP
• ODS
• TXT, 
• BAS
• C, CC, CPP, CXX, H, HPP
• CS
• PY
• JAVA
• PL
• WML, WAP
• XML

Using ext: will produce the same results.

This is an extremely important command for content creators who want to improve information gain. However, Google’s patent on information gain needs to be understood first. The information gain score indicates how much more information a given source can provide to someone who has already seen other sources on the same topic. Pages with a better score will rank higher than pages with a low information gain score.

If a group of documents covers the same topic, they may contain similar information. In that case, 10 articles on a similar topic will appear on the first SERP page. For Google, this is a problem, because users do not want to read 10 blogs with the same advice.

Using the filetype: operator, you can find important information in PDF and Word files that would be difficult to obtain through a traditional search of later results pages.

13. around(X)

The around(X) command covers word proximity by limiting results to pages containing the searched words within “X” words of one another. The maximum gap or distance between words is described using any number in brackets. This command can be helpful when looking for forgotten quotes, sentences or references.

14. daterange:[XXXXX-XXXXX]

The advanced search operator daterange: displays results from a selected date range. However, it uses the Julian calendar date format, in which you need to enter the year, followed by the number of days that have passed since the start of the year. To avoid making a mistake, it is a good idea to use an online converter. This way, you can be sure that the date format will be correct.

This command can be helpful in determining the volume and amount of content published on a given topic over a specific period of time.

15. “keyword”

If you use quotation marks when searching in Google, you will narrow the search result down to a specific phrase. Google will show pages containing the given phrase in the content, title or description. In addition to improving the results obtained for the query, the quotation mark search modifier is one of the most effective ways of finding cases of content copying.

You can even copy an entire paragraph from your online content, paste it together with quotation marks and check whether someone has copied your content. Of course, there are also other solutions for looking for cases of content theft, such as Copyscape. Nevertheless, it is one of the fastest ways of finding the source of the problem.

16. OR

If you want to combine searches, simply add OR (written in capitals) between the search terms (phrase1 OR phrase2). Google will show results matching the first OR the second search term. Using the “|” operator will produce identical results. This solution is useful when looking for information on more than one topic, when you do not necessarily want results containing references to both topics.

17. -keyword

The minus sign (-) is a simple tool that can be used when you want to exclude a specific search term/topic from your results. This command is not limited to one exclusion. You can add more to improve filtering even further and get more specific results.

This solution is beneficial if you are looking for something that has more than one meaning and want to exclude the second meaning. This operator can also be used when we want to get rid of some branded search results.

18. source:

The source: command allows you to search for specific sources of information on a given topic in Google News. If you are looking for articles or potential link partners who write about a similar topic, this command can be very useful.

19. @

You are looking for specific results from social media. Adding the @ modifier before the query will display social media results. This way, you can search for the official channels of various companies or organisations.

20. *

To get more matches, you can use the operator in the form of an asterisk (*). If you place it between terms, the results will include all versions of a given phrase. This is useful when searching for phrases and quotes. This solution is also useful during technical audits and work related to maintaining and improving the domain. However, additional commands are necessary.

Combining different search operators. Application examples

One of the best things about using Google search operators is the ability to combine them in specific use cases. This means that you can more effectively search for official documents, original images or quote sources, as well as other elements.

Looking for link building opportunities

One of the most common uses of search operators is looking for link building opportunities or discovering how competitors acquire them. There are plenty of command combinations that deliver similar results:

• [topic] wpis AROUND(3) sponsorowany,
• [topic] intitle:”wpis sponsorowany”,
• [topic] intext:”sponsorowany przez”,
• [topic] intext:”wpis sponsorowany”.

Don’t need sponsored posts? There is nothing to worry about. Try the following Google search operators:

• [topic] “write for us”,
• [topic] intitle:”write for us”,
• [topic] inurl:”write for us”,
• [topic] inurl:”write-for-us” intitle:”write for us”.

Moreover, you can include the following search phrase options:

• “guest engagement”,
• “guest post”,
• “write for me”,
• “become a contributor”,
• “guest post guidelines”.

Discovering internal linking opportunities

There are simple concepts that allow you to discover internal linking opportunities. One option is also to prevent topic duplication. Before you start working, it is a good idea to use the command below to check whether, and how many, similar pages have already been published:

[topic] site:yoursite.com

If you see a similar heading, it is worth reviewing and updating the older post, or looking for an alternative topic.

Another point is looking for existing references. When creating content, adding internal links (where it makes sense) is a sensible SEO strategy. Using the command below, you can search general topics described and add internal links to existing pages:

site:yoursite.com intext:topic

Internal links can also be added to a new post. After it is published, adding internal links from older content leading to the new post will help with indexing and transferring some of the existing authority.

site:yoursite.com intext:topic -site:yoursite.com/your-published-url