Advanced Access Blog

Many of our clients ask us about how to find certain types of information in Google, most notably, which pages they have indexed for your website. The way to do this is to use a specialized search option called a “command.” The types of commands we’ll be going over today tell the search engine that you are looking for particular information in regards to a specific website within their index. So let’s go over the different types of Site Specific commands and what they do.

Site:

The “site:” command allows you to do a search for results within a given website. So let’s say that you want to find any information on the Advanced Access website about our Marketing Packages, you would do the following search on Google:

site:AdvancedAccess.com Marketing Package

You’ll notice that there is no space between the “site:” and the URL in question. You’ll also notice that there IS a space between the URL and the terms I am searching for on their website. You MUST enter the command this way in order for it to work.

Site: (Part 2)

You can also use the “site:” command in order to simply see which pages of a website the search engine has indexed overall.

site:www.AdvancedAccess.com

You will want to keep in mind that doing a search for “site:www.AdvancedAccess.com” and a search for “site:AdvancedAccess.com” may return different results, as you are specifying whether or not you want the www version or the non-www version of the URL to be searched.

You’ll also want to remember that not all pages of your site may show up. This is something that Google is working on fixing right now, but in the meantime you can try clicking on the “repeat the search with omitted results included” link and it may bring up more results.

Link:

The “link:” command allows you to view a list of webpages that have links pointing TO the site you are searching. So, if you wanted to find out which sites are linking to Advanced Access you would perform the following search:

link:www.AdvancedAccess.com

It is important that you remember that Google will not show you ALL of the websites that are linking to a given website, but a random sample. They do this for your protection, as they do not want your competitors knowing where all of your inbound links are coming from, that would make it too easy to game the system!

Info:

The “info:” command allows you to view any information that Google has about a given website. Performing this search:

info:www.AdvancedAccess.com

Will give you the following options:

Show Google’s cache of www.AdvancedAccess.com
Find web pages that are similar to www.AdvancedAccess.com
Find web pages that link to www.AdvancedAccess.com
Find web pages from the site www.AdvancedAccess.com
Find web pages that contain the term www.AdvancedAccess.com

These commands will all help you to learn a little more about your website… or maybe your competitors site!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Search Engine Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.