How can you use search operators for SEO?
New google advanced SEO support page shows how to use search operators for identifying errors and making improvements.
Google published an advanced SEO help page about using google search operators to debug a website.
Google search operator search results are not tied to google’s regular ranking algorithm and the index used is limited and not up to date.
Yet even with those limitations, the search operators provide useful information that can be used for search engine optimization-related purposes.
They aren’t useful for trying to learn about google’s algorithm.
But the search operators are very useful for learning more about a website.
The new documentation contains a statement about the limitations of the data search operators can however be used to discover interesting information about a site.
How can you use search operators for SEO?
The site search operator shows a sample of the pages in google.
It’s not all the pages as google’s caveat makes clear when it stated that the search operators are bound by indexing and retrieval limits.
Site search does not use google’s regular ranking algorithm and only shows a sample of pages that are indexed.
There’s always been a random quality to all search operators and that makes them unreliable in terms of completeness and especially for trying to find out ranking or algorithm-related factors.
This has been true for all of the search operators.
Cache: Search Operator
The cache search operator shows you to google’s cache of a web page a copy of what the page looked like when Googlebot last crawled it.
The cache is a great way to figure out if a site is hacked and showing different content to google cloaking.
Related: Search Operator
the related search operator is a nice one it tells you what other sites google identifies as related to the site being searched.
The related search operator can be useful for telling you if there’s something wrong with the content relevance if google shows wildly unrelated sites as being related.
- Src: The Hotlink Finder
The src search operator finds pages that hop link to an image.
ImageSize:
the image size search operator finds images with a specific size and is typically used with a site search operator the two image search operators also have limitations.
Google Search Operators have many uses although not all of the uses might be apparent at first glance.
for example, I’ve never had a use for the image size search operator but there may come a day when I need to know if google has crawled or indexed an image with specific image dimensions.
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