A Comprehensive Guide to Advanced Search Operators

First things first, let us tell you that Google simply dominates the search engine industry with a staggering market share of 78 percent. This is precisely the reason why webmasters can’t stop looking beyond Google, despite the search engine giant giving them an increasingly hard time ranking their sites for their desired keywords.

However, that’s only if you have been trying to fight Google at its own game. In other words, Google’s algorithm getting better at fighting spam is probably only worrying for you if you’re into shady or black hat stuff.

If you’re willing to put in the time and effort to rank the right way, however, you’re probably in a better position to rank today than you were a few years back. With that being said, stick around as we walk you through advanced search operators that help you discover great, natural link building opportunities.

Advanced Search Operators

Allinanchor: This search operator would return results that are linking out to a site using a particular anchor text. For example, if you search for “allinanchor:Best SEO Company” (without the quotes), you would fine sites that are linking out to sites using the text “best SEO company.”

This can be a great way to find the type of links your competitors are building, so that you can come up with a better SEO strategy to outrank them.

Allintext: Simply put, this search query helps you find pages that contain the particular text you’re looking for. Example: Searching for “allintext:SEO checklist” would get you results that contain the words “SEO” and “checklist.”

Allintitle: Similar to the above search operator, this one helps you find results that contain specific words in their title. For example, searching for “allintitle:SEO tips” would return results that contain the words “SEO” and “tips” in their title.

This search query is often used by marketers to analyze niche competition.

Author: This a slightly different search operator, helping you find Google Groups newsgroup articles written by the author you put in the search using this search operator. Example: “author:Rand Fishkin” would get you documents published under the name of “Rand Fishkin.”

Define: Similar to the above search query, this one helps you get definitions for the terms you put after the query. Example: You need to put “define:blog” into the search bar if you’re looking for the definition of the term “blog.”

Intext: This is similar to the allintext search operator but allows you to be more flexible with what you’re searching for. Basically, it allows you to search for documents that contain the words you mention after the search operator as text, but the rest of the words in your search query may be mentioned anywhere on the page.

For example, if you search for “Rand Fishkin intext:SEO,” you will get results that have the word “SEO” in the text of the page, but “Rand Fishkin” may be mentioned anywhere on the page.

Intitle: Pretty much the same as the above search operator, except that it’s more concerned with the title of the results rather than the text. It allows you to search for specific words in the title, while the rest of the words can be anywhere on the page. For example, if you’re search for “SEO guide intitle:help,” you will get results that have the word “help” in the title but the words “SEO” and “guide” may be anywhere on the page.

Site: This is a simple search operator that helps you limit the search results to only a specific site. Example: Searching for “SEO update site:Moz.com” would help you find results that are talking about an SEO update, but only from Moz.com.

A Final Word

Finally, once you get familiar with these advanced search operators, you can go ahead and use them to find great link building opportunities using the ways mentioned in the infographic.

Author Bio:

Brandon Leibowitz, owner of SEO Optimizers, has been involved with digital marketing since 2007 with an emphasis on search engine optimization. He runs a social media blog called getplusfollowers.com. His knowledge and advice has helped countless people improve their online presence.

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