Getting Smarter with Google Search

Getting Smarter with Google Search

How to Generate Customised Search Results in Google

By Perry Bernard – Organic SEO Specialist

[Using search parameters in Google to search smarter]

As an analyst of SEO data I often have to check search results in Google. The problem is, there’s a lot of data I don’t want to look at, or I may want to check the presence of one particular site, directory or subdomain at a time. We’ve even had the need to speed up being able to extract contact details from websites without ever visiting the website.

Because of these advanced needs, I have used the following search query modifications. Some of them I use every single day, so I think you might appreciate hearing about them here.

Site search:

This is the one I use most often, and it’s one of the more basic ones. To perform a search in Google and render only the pages of a particular website, then use this search query:

site:crankedseo.com

This query renders all pages in the root domain “domainname.com” and all pages in any subdomains as well. You can narrow down this search by including more in the URL part of the statement. For example: site:domainname.com/products/ will render all pages in the folder /products/ but nothing else, and assuming there is a folder or path name that matches.

site:blog.domainname.com will render all pages in the subdomain “blog”.

This means finding how many indexed products are in a website is fairly easy, even without access to Google Search Console or to the website CMS admin. You can analyse a lot about a website from seeing which pages are indexed. Add a tool like MOZ Bar to your browser, and you’re on your way to detecting site-wide SEO signals that could aid with rank.

Read the full article here.