A non exhaustive list of useful search engine analysis google commands
Google has a lot of command to restrict or in general to optimize your google search experience. Some are very powerful, other quite useless, but all of them are not very used by the big public. Actually google results are accurate enough to show what you are looking for after only a few searches that nobody really feels the need to understand and use more complicated queries.
By the way, as a Search engine optimizer you must know that there are a few very useful command that permit you to gather deeper information about a site, about a keyword and in general how google view your site or your competitor’s site.
I have listed here the commands I use the most and I’m giving an explanation why I use them. If you want to know all of them, just search in google for: google commands and you will for sure find what you are looking for.
In our enhanced keyword difficulty tool we make use of most of these commands to enhance the results you can have from our standard free keyword difficulty analysis tool. If you need a deeper analysis of your keyword please contact us.
site:
Type in google search: site:www.yoursite.com and you will see which pages of your web site are indexed.
This analysis in it’s simplicity is very important, either to
- understand how good the spider indexed your web site
If your web site is 1.000 pages and google sees only 300 pages you have a problem!
If google shows 1.000 pages but most of them appear in the omitted results also you have a problem
- measure your competitors web site.
Of course you can’t know how many pages your competitor really has, but generally speaking a web site with much more pages than yours is stronger.
We make use also of this command in our keyword difficulty tool to compare enhance the analysis of the competitors web site and we compare how big they are.
cache:
Type in google search: site:www.yoursite.com and you will see a page with a picture of your web site and on the top a bunch of information.
I’m sure you already used this command, actually you can access this command also trough the google tool bar if you enable the page info button.
By the way it gives very important information and a quick understanding of what the spider see of your (or your competitor) web site.
The most important information it give is the date of the last visit of the spider. To be honest this value is not correct because if you check your own logs you will probably see that the spider crowled your page more recently than what this value says. But, for the purpose of understanding if the spider likes to visit your competitor’s web site it’s very useful. If you notice that a web page was last time visited one year ago it means very clearly that it’s not such an important page for google.
Another important information you can get trough this command is to have a quick analysis of how google view your site. Just click in the information on the top cached text only and you will see your or your competitor’s web site as the spider can see it. Actually it is not correct what I’m saying, the spider reads the html and gathers many more information then the visual feeling you get like this, but it’s still very useful and quick for your analysis.
Check it yourself. You will be astonished to see how bad some web site are made and how obvious it is that they can’t perform on searche engines!
We make use also of this command in our enhanced keyword analysis to compare how fresh is the content of the search engine resulting top pages for each keyword.
link:
Type in google search: link:www.yoursite.com and you will see a result page indicating all the web pages linking to your web site.
In general terms what I just said it is true, but in the reality google doesn’t show all the incoming links. Don’t ask me the reason why google has chosen only to pick some incoming but only a small amount of links are shown and very often these are not the most important links. Of course google is aware of all the links and stores them all in its database and consider them all in its analysis.
The only way to bypass this odd google behaviour is to switch to yahoo to make this kind of incoming link analysis.
Just go to yahoo search and type: link:http://www.yoursite.com and you will get the list of all incoming links to your web site home page.
To be precise yahoo has two possible commands: link and linksite. The first, described above indicates only links to your home page. The second (linksite:www.yoursite.com) shows all links to your web site.
A very important point to consider in your link building strategy is also the link deepness. The more deep are the links in web site the more natural the links appear and the more valuable they will be considered from search engines.