Helpful Google Search Operators

There are some Google search operators (search commands) that you can enter while researching information on Google and other search engines. Some useful, not everyone knows, are presented in this post.

Getting started: Google search operators that get the most out of the search

How the normal search works, I do not need to explain. But what if you want to make Google search more targeted and specific?

Determine exact search results

The quotation marks “allow you to display search results that contain exactly the search term you put in quotation marks using the search command. BSWP. For on-page optimization “2020,” you will only see results with the addition “2020”.

OR for different search terms

Can you not decide on a term while searching? Use “OR” to query various search terms at once.

With the search operator “OR” you can see on the picture, that here results for “OnPage” as well as “OffPage” are displayed.

With a vertical line, you can also look for two different things at the same time. “Spaghetti with sauce | without sauce.”

Use the minus sign to exclude specific terms in the search

The search operator “-” (minus) allows you to exclude specific terms from the search results. Example: If you are looking for information only about the Sport Golf and not about the car, you have to enter “Golf -VW-Auto” in the search results to exclude the vehicle.

plus sign

The plus sign allows you to combine multiple terms to get more accurate search results. This approach is well suited for the first search for suitable blogs and forums in your niche, e.g., “Blog + SEO” or “Forum + SEO” or when looking for opportunities for guest contributions: “Guest Post + SEO.”

Use asterisks as a gap fill

With “*,” you can use a wildcard in the search if you are looking for terms that are not yet known to you, such as Eg “lenses”.”

Advanced Google search operators

With advanced search operators, you can more accurately and quickly search for information about Google search.

You can also carry out a first SEO check with some operators, or you can also conduct an SEO competition analysis and find link sources.

Site queries

The Site Query allows you to search for different keywords, restricted to a particular website. Use: “site: yoursite.com + Keyword”.

For search engine optimization, this command is useful for seeing the title and meta description of each subpage. Enter “site: yoururl.com.” Also, you can see with this query how many subpages were indexed on Google.

Site Queries with POSTS (useful on Facebook and Co.)

Facebook and other closed portals often have no really good search. With this command you can search such portals: “site: facebook.com / * / posts + Keyword”.

(All) intext:

The “allintext:” command finds search terms in the texts of websites (page titles, addresses, etc. are not taken into account), eg. Eg, “allintext: SEO Contest 2019”. Allintext here means that, if possible, only search results are displayed that contain all the keywords you specify.

Using the “intext:” operator, you start a search query for results in whose texts one of the terms occurs. If you put “intext:” before every term, this has the same effect as the search operator “allintext.”

There are a few more “allin …” and “in …” operators, which are briefly introduced below.

(All) intitle:

For “allintitle: Keyword,” pages with the corresponding keyword will be displayed in the title, eg. Eg, “allintitle: technical SEO 2019”.

The search operator “intitle: Keyword” will also display results in which the title contains the keyword. If you use multiple keywords (“intitle: Moon Cake Pizza”), you will search for titles that use at least one of these keywords. You can also set your keyword first, and then the search operator for even more targeted results, such as Eg “universe intitle moon.” Writing “intitle:” before each search term has the same effect as “allintitle.”

(All) inurl:

This command searches for the specified search terms in the search results of the URLs. For example, you can search for “inurl: seo inurl: 2019” or “allinurl: seo 2019” to find search results with the corresponding keywords in the URL.

(all) inanchor: Scan for backlinks with link texts

“Allinanchor” or “inanchor” finds websites that have been linked to your keyword you are looking for, e.g., B. “Blog inanchor: backlinks” finds search results that contain the term “blog” and which show backlinks with the link text “backlinks.”

Search operator related:

The related operator displays pages that are similar to the one you’ve specified (for example, “related: www.xing.com”).

Granted, the search operator “related” does not always show optimal results. Here’s an example with Xing.com and as “similar” is displayed studies and other slightly inappropriate pages. Linkedin would have been more appropriate.

location: Show results in specific regions only

The “location:” operator lets you display limited search results to particular areas, such as: For example, “laser tag location: United States” shows only LaserTag arcades in United States (not even nearby!).

near: Search term in close proximity to each other

With the search operator “Near,” you get pages whose keywords are not directly one after another, but not more than ten other terms are located apart. Example: “football wm 2019 NEAR paris”.

The counterpart is the operator “FAR,” so you are looking for two terms that are in a text as far away from each other as possible.

filetype: Search for specific file formats

Limit the results to particular sizes with this search operator, for example: “Content Promotion and Distribution filetype: pdf” only finds documents that find these keywords in PDF formats. With the addition “OR (|),” you can search for several documents at the same time, such as “Search engine optimization filetype: doc | filetype: pdf.”

define: Find definitions

With “define:” you can only search definitions for your keyword: “define: seo” displays various definitions of SEO.

cache: View cached content from the Google cache

With “cache: www.domain.com,” the older version of the specified website can be viewed from the Google cache. This can be helpful if the current website does not exist.

ip: IP operator at Bing

Although only Google search operators have been introduced here, there is a reason to use Bing. On this search engine, you can find out other domains with the same IP address. It can be interesting and useful to see which sites share an IP and reside on the same web server. Enter “ip: HERE THE IP ADDRESS” in the search bar.

How to find out the IP address? Countless tools on the Internet let you see the IP addresses of a website. You now know some (Google) search operators to search for relevant content 😉 quickly.

Good luck with searching.