Simple Search Operators for Site and Competitive Analysis

For anyone involved in the search biz this is truly 101-level stuff, but it's so second-nature to us that we tend to forget that not everyone knows these things. It can be fun to see the light bulb go on when I show a client how some basic search operators can give them quick insights into their own web presence and to see how they stack up against the competition.

I'll use Google and Yahoo for illustration, but in many cases these operators also work with other search engines.

The site: operator….

In the Google search box simply enter site:www.yoursite.com. This will give you a listing of all the pages that Google has listed in their index. At top right you'll see a bolded estimate of total pages indexed by Google, and the search results show a list of of those pages. Here's how that looks for the New York Times.

How is this useful?

1. Sometimes a big differentiator between you and your competitors might be content volume. All else being equal, the site with more content is more likely to be pulling more search referrals.
2. Considering how critical titles and descriptions can be to your SEO strategy, this a quick way to scan a listing of your site content. For instance, you might discover that you have multiple pages with the same title/description, and you can take a look at those pages to see what you can do to make each page unique. Here's an example of how a site might be foregoing some potential search referrals by not using unique page titles:

You might also find that you have pages in the index that are dragging down your SEO strength, and you can take actions to remove them from the index (Kurt Krejny has a great post on this topic called "10 Traffic-Stealing Weeds That Suck the Life Out of Your Google Garden and How to Yank Them".

In the above example, the privacy and contact pages could be excluded from search engine indexes using a robots.txt file (may be important to visitors, but have no real value in search results).
 

The link: operator….

As you may already know, inbound links are extremely important to your search visibility. You can optimize your site 'til you're blue in the face, but without links from other sites, on-site optimization is pointless.

The link: operator can give you a quick view of links that are already pointing to your site, AND, if you're trying catch up to competitors, looking at their links can give you valuable insights into what it will take to do so. This operator is used like this: link:www.domain.com.

Here's what it looks like for the New York Times. This time the total at top right is an estimate of total inbound links, and the search results are a listing of those links, but… it's important to know that Google does not actually show you accurate totals or list them all.

For a better idea of what's really going on you're better off doing the same query over at Yahoo. But there's more…. That last query will show you something like this:

Note the words "to: Only this URL". That means that that there are roughly 19,000,000 links to the NY Times home page. If you change setting to "Entire Site" you see this:

Why is this number so much bigger? Because it includes links to the home page PLUS links to any other page on the site. These are commonly called "deep links". This is a whole subject unto itself, but suffice it to say, deep links are a good thing.