Advanced Search Operators and SEO - Combining Intitle and Inanchor Commands
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intitle:keyword inanchor:keyword
By combining two commands you can get results that list real SEO savvy competitors. When you use this command you will see results that have your keywords both in the page title and as anchor text for incoming links. . Again, take the information with a grain of salt and use both Google and Yahoo. Let's see the results.
Google:
intitle:mortgage intitle:broker inanchor:mortgage inanchor:broker - Google shows 276,000 results. Among these results you can see a good number of sites specifically optimized for the term.
Yahoo:
intitle:mortgage intitle:broker inanchor:mortgage inanchor:broker - Yahoo shows 168,000 results and gives many of the same sites as Google for this command. If the same site shows up on both search engines, it's another indication that the owner optimized for this keyword.
The down side is that this method does not consider domain power. Many old corporate sites don't have many anchor-rich links, but have many authoritative old links that carry them to the top regardless of anchors.
Site: Command
site:www.site.com
With this command you can learn how many of your pages the search engine knows about. It's good for checking out competitor pages and analyzing their size. If your competition has 100,000+ pages and you boast 500 pages, it's going to be pretty tough competing with them.
Check out site:seochat.com. Google gives 298,000 results. The same search on Yahoo redirects to Yahoo Site Explorer, which is another useful tool in SEO analysis. We'll cover it in this article a bit later. The Yahoo site:command gives 1,050,232 results.
The site command is also used for brand searches on Google. Check out the results for Wikipedia. Below the site links you can find another search box, which redirects to "site:keyword"
Cache:Command
cache:site.com
This command shows the last date since the search engine spidered a page. NOT indexed it, but spidered it, meaning it sent a crawler and got a copy. This doesn't mean that it has the latest version of the page in the index (the part you can search with keywords).
By checking out the cache date you can track how often Google sends spiders to the site. The more authoritative the site is, the more often Google sends a spider to it. The less authoritative a site, the less often it gets spidered.
This information helps in link building. For example, if you're about to buy a link from a website, check how often that site gets spidered. If the time frame is once in 1.5 months, chances are Google does not consider this site an important one. If on the other hand the time span is a few days, then the site is pretty authoritative.
NOTE: Old pages may be spidered. Check domain vs. page cache dates.
Link:Command
This command is supposed to show links pointing to a site, but it's outright distorted on Google, so don't put any weight on Google's results. Yahoo redirects to Yahoo Site Explorer, which is the next topic of this article.
Next: Yahoo Site Explorer >>
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