Sometimes friends ask me why I enter funny characters into a Google search. What black magic do you know?
I will use this post to share ten simple tips you can use to get better results with Google.
1) Site: - Refines your search results to a single website
Ex. site:nytimes.com Obama
2) Link: – Produces a list of sites linking to a particular website. This is a good way to better understand your Google juice as inbound linking from high Pagerank sites is extremely powerful way to build SEO.
Ex. link:harpercollins.com
3) Cache: - Google takes a snapshot of each page examined as it crawls the web and caches these as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable. If you click on the “Cached” link, you will see the web page as it looked when we indexed it. The cached content is the content Google uses to judge whether this page is a relevant match for your query.
This is a good tool if you are looking to understand what the page looked like before changes were made or a page that was recently taken down
Ex. Cache:time.com
4) Quotes < ” ” > – This allows you to search for an exact phrase. I sometimes use quotes to search for a particular error statement I want to learn more about.
Ex. “You do not have permission to send to this recipient”
5) Include < + > – Google is smart about excluding typical filler words in search queries such as I, the, a, of, etc. However there are instances where all words are critical to get your desired search results. In this case I suggest you use the + sign between words. This can be helpful searching for a name of a song.
Ex. The+Way+It+Goes
6) Exclude < – > – Similar to the Include mentioned above, the exclude is a filer that excludes words from a search result.
Ex. Tree Frogs -Red Eyed
7) Related: – This tool allows you to search for sites that have related content, tools, etc. which means a related audience.
Ex. related:harpercollins.com
Phonebook: – This taps into Google’s phonebook service which displays an address, phone number, and mapping services. It also allows users to remove a listing from the results.
Ex. phonebook:John Doe
9) Filetype: – This provides an easy way for users to search for a file type.
Ex. seo best practices filetype:ppt
10) Daterange: – This provides you with the ability to limit search results by a range of years. It can be helpful when searching for historical data.
Ex. John Belushi obituary 1980..1984
