Google operators and their impact on SEO

It’s not only experts that use the Google advanced search operators on a daily basis to help cut down on returned search results, now everyday users are also integrating these into their searches. Google returns hundreds of thousands, if not millions of results for any given search term and most people don’t often go past the first three pages of these, so why not use any tools available to make these results more specific? This is where the Google Advanced search operators come in. These advanced operators enable you to search in a much more detailed manor enabling you to get much more precise results.

Bing have recently capitalised on this insight with their television advertising campaign which focuses on ‘information overload’ and how their SERP attempt to overcome this problem, and recently Google have introduced yet more ways of searching. These cut the amount of results given and leave those that are returned being much more tailored, making searching quicker and easier. Some of the search commands that Google supports are as follows:

Related :domain – this will list websites that are similar or related to the domain given. This could be an extremely useful tool for finding websites to contact for relevant link exchanges. To make this work you don’t need to use the http:// bit at the front.

- (and +) - this will remove pages that contain the given term from results, for example south Africa – world cup will show all pages containing the words ‘south africa’ but NOT those related to the world cup.

Allintitle:search term – this ensures that results are very accurate to you search term as the title will have to contain all words you search. This one is highly useful for SEO purposes as it can help find related sites to help with you link building efforts as it is a clear indicator of the importance of using keywords in your titles. This is very useful when you are searching for a specific or specialised product and know exactly what you want, such as the example given below.


Phonebook:name – this is a new command and can bring up a list of phone numbers for people with that name who you search for. You might be a little shocked by the amount of information so readily available! Although only currently available for US numbers this could be a useful tool for getting in touch with people of interest, for example bloggers or online experts.

Type of document: You can also search for documents on Google, and one of the newest operators that they have introduced enables you to search for document by type – search term:document/presentation.spreadsheet etc. A great way to cut down you time spent researching and finding the content that you want.


With more and more people adapting their searches as the internet becomes overloaded with an increasing amount of information it seems that these advanced search operators may be the way forward, not only for industry professionals but also for simple searches. And if you’ve got any more that you find useful we would love to hear about them.