How to Generate Customised Search Results in Google.
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:
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.
URL content search:
I like this one too and also use it often. This search allows you to render search results for any URLs that contain a keyword phrase you specify in this format: inurl:{keyword phrase}
For example: inurl:pdf
This search query will render Google search results of any URLs that contain the letters “pdf”. This would most likely render lots of results of PDF documents, but could also be for html pages that include the same letters.
Combining search queries:
You can combine the site: and inurl: queries like this:
site:domainname.com inurl:pdf
This query will render all URLs in the domain “domianname.com” that also contain the letters “pdf”, so you’re likely to get a result showing pdf documents that are indexed in the domain “domainname.com”. You can also use negatives:
site:domainname.com –inurl:pdf
This one renders all URLs in “domainname.com” that don’t include the letters “pdf” in the URL. That’s handy for detecting html pages and removing pdfs from the result. It’s not 100% fool proof though. You still need to be aware that html pages with “pdf” in the URL end up being removed too.
“keyword” search
Placing a keyword into Google search in quote marks will render results for pages that contain exactly the content of the words inside the quote. It’s different to ‘regular’ searches because without the quote marks Google will assume you are looking for something related to the word or phrase, or near matches to the phrase, and also partial matches of the phrase in either form or meaning. For example, you might search for spa pools without quotes and may return a result that mentions swimming pools but not spa pools. Deep into search results you might even get a result for a motel that has a spa and a pool room. By using the quote marks, Google will only return results with exactly “spa pools” on it. Even “spa pool” will get skipped because it isn’t an exact match. Try it. You’ll see the matching words get highlighted in bold text in Google search results.
Try this example: “tax accounting services Auckland city” and include the quote marks when doing the search.
Advanced combinations:
A while ago I wanted to find websites for businesses preferably located in Auckland and wanted their contact phone number without having to visit the website. I used a query like this:
inurl:contact “Auckland” “09” < click on this to test it!
Try it. You’ll find that by placing the exact phrases (keyword in quotes) for “Auckland” and “09” I encouraged Google to give results with the word “contact” in the URL, and render their phone number prefix in the snippet thereby overriding the snippet if they had one written. Ty is again with “021” instead of “09” and you’ll get those with Vodafone mobile numbers.
Take it a bit further by removing some of the resulting set like this:
inurl:contact “Auckland” “09” –inurl:govt –inurl:org < click on this to test it!
That one removes any URLs with govt and/or org in them, meaning you get rid of most of the government or charity / no-profit organisations with the .org or .govt extensions from the result. Again, there are some pitfalls when using these queries, like for example when the letters “govt” or “org” occur as part of the domain name instead of the domain extension, but it’s fairly uncommon for these examples.
You can also combine the “quotes” with a site: query like this:
site:crankedseo.com “Google Search Console” < click on this to test it!
This search renders all pages in my website that mention Google Search Console in exactly that form. This happens to be a navigation label in my main nav, so it actually renders all pages that have my main nav on them (which is all of them). You could try to narrow this by using the following search instead:
site:crankedseo.com intitle:“Google Search Console” < click on this to test it!
That would narrow it down to a page in this website with this exact phrase in the title.
For more articles and recommended reading about Search Engine Optimisation, visit here.
