Website 101: Google Commands You Need to Know (Webmasters Tools Part 1)

Knowing these commands can give you a significant advantage when doing online research or when you are researching keywords for your website.

What is a Google Search Command?

It is a command word that you can optionally include in your Google search that instructs the search engine to handle your words in a special way. Below is a list of the some commonly used commands that may come in useful.

LINK

The link command lists pages that link to the site (page) you specify. (These kinds of links are called Inbound Links).

Webmasters use this command a lot to gauge how many inbound links exist to their website.

When you type the command make sure that you don’t leave a space after the ink: command and your site address. It should look like link:www.syncrony.com .

Google limitations:

1) Google used to limit returned results to pages having a PageRank of over 3 or 4. This limitation has been removed a long time ago.

2) Link results are not real-time results and are usually delayed by about a month.

Trick: You can use :www.syncrony.com to return a (usually) larger list of linked sites that is also usually more up to date than link:

Tip: You can exclude a site from the link: search by adding the site address using the –site: command. Like this: link:www.syncrony.com -site:google.com . This will exclude and Google links from the links search.

SITE:

The site: command restricts search results to the specified sub-domain. You can specify just the domain and get all pages indexed for the domain or you can specify an search term. If you specify a search term Google will return all instances of the term from the specified domain.

So for a list of all occurrences of Syncrony.com you would type site:syncrony.com. This would return all pages indexed for syncrony.com.

For a list of all occurrences of the search term “web design” in the domain syncrony.com you would type site:syncrony.com web design .

The command can be used for a global look at a search term in your geographical area. Like site:co.za web design . This would return all indexed pages that contain the words “web design” in the co.za domain.

INTITLE

The title of a web page is a very important piece of text both for Google’s search purposes and for the site owner. The title is the text that appears in the topmost (usually blue) bar of your web browser.

Google keeps an index of just the intitle text and you can search this index using the intitle command.

The lesson for the webmaster is that each page should have unique title text and that the title text is important. This text must contain an important keyword or keyword phrase because it will be indexed and will be available for search using the intitle: command.

An intitle search usually returns much fewer results that a general search does. Always do a check for the keywords you are planning to use with and without the intitle command. A highly useable keyword may present itself by having few results in an intitle search.

SITE and INTITLE Together

Now you know them as individual commands, you can quickly learn to combine them for even more valuable results.

intitle:Milk Thistle site:co.za

This will return all occurrences of “milk thistle” in the title bars of all sites in the coza domain.

Related Documents:

1) For a more detailed explanation of Google’s Search see: Website 101: Google Search Explained

2) Google Commands You Need to Know (Part 2 –Commands for General Convenience)

3) Website 101

References:

Using the site: command: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-site-command.html