In this video, I’m going to show you how to master the art of Google advanced search operators.
Stay tuned.
[Intro Music]
Hey, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research
your competitors and dominate your niche.
And in this video, we’re going to cover most of these search operators, which are
super useful in various marketing tasks and of course, I’ll show you actionable ways
that you can use them.
Let’s dive in.
If you’re new to Google search operators, let me go through a few rapid fire examples
of the main ones I’ll be using throughout this tutorial.
The first is "site:".
This operator limits results to a specific website.
So if I type in site:ahrefs.com, you’ll only see pages from this domain that Google
has indexed.
Next are quotation marks, which searches for an exact phrase match.
For example, if I do a regular search for Bill Gates, you’ll see in the snippet that
they reference him as “William Henry Gates.”
So if we search for “William Gates” in quotation marks without his middle name, then
it’ll filter out the original Wiki result for Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
Next is the minus sign.
If we want to narrow down the search even more, then we can add -microsoft and it’ll
bring our query down by tens of thousands of results because it’s excluding pages
with the word “Microsoft” in the copy.
Next is "OR" and "AND."
I’ll also show you how to use parentheses in your search queries.
So, using the OR operator, you can search for something like (bill OR william) gates.
By wrapping the first part in parentheses, we’re grouping them together.
Think about it as doing two separate Google searches:
one for Bill Gates and another for William Gates and then merging the results together
while weeding out duplicates.
As for the AND operator, it returns only the results related to both X and Y in your search query.
Alright, let’s get into some actionable tips and I’ll explain new operators that
come up on the fly.
The first tip is to find site indexation errors:
So if I type in site:nerdfitness.com, you’ll see that it has a ton of results.
Now this is obviously way too many results to go through manually, so I’ll narrow it
down to their blog by adding /blog/ to our query
Now there’s a more manageable amount of results for a quick scan.
But having looked through their blog, I’m pretty sure they use Wordpress.
So what I can do is add /page/ to our query and we’re down to around 50 or so results,
which is actually a bad thing.
For Wordpress sites, the /page/ pages are normally archived blog posts.
Plus, you’ll see that some have query strings.
So if I owned this site, I would probably noindex these page URLs.
Now, if you are a Wordpress user, then you can also look for pages without value by appending
/tag/ or /page/ to your query and then noindex them.
Another cool thing you can do is to do a "site:" search with an exact URL after you publish
a new page or post.
So, if it’s been a long time and it’s still not showing up in Google’s index,
then you should check Search Console for potential indexation errors.
The next query is to find people who are stealing your content without your permission.
And this is super common with eCommerce product page descriptions.
So if you look at this product page for some Nike shoes, I’ll just copy a snippet of
the description here.
And then I’ll go back to Google and paste in the text wrapped in quotation marks.
Then I’m going to use the minus search operator and type in site:zappos.com.
This is going to search for the exact phrase match of our copied text and exclude any pages
from the zappos.com website.
And you’ll see quite a few results.
You can also do this with blog posts.
Looking through the top pages report in Ahrefs Site Explorer for healthline.com, a popular
health website, you’ll see that their article on how to lose weight gets over 250,000 search
visitors every single month!
So I’ll click through to the article and copy the title.
Next, I’ll go to Google and search for:
Intitle: then wrap the title in quotation marks, -site:healthline.com and I’ll also
add -site:pinterest.com.
Now this query is going to find pages that have this exact match phrase in the title
of their article, but not pages from Healthline or Pinterest.
And there are quite a few results here too.
Often times, the results will be syndicated content which links back to the site,
but you should still check these articles to make sure that you’re getting proper attribution.
We actually have a really cool feature in our tool, Content Explorer, where you can
quickly check if these sites have linked to you or not.
So I’ll copy the query from Google and modify it slightly by removing "in," since we use
title: and run the search.
And we have about 25 results.
Now, the thing with Content Explorer is that we weed out a lot of the junk links that you’ll
often see in Google, so the results set should be more focused and probably a little bit
less than what you've see on Google.
Now, from here, I can click on the “highlight unlinked domains” dropdown and enter in
the domain healthline.com.
And right away, you can see that this site didn’t link to Healthline since the domain
is highlighted in yellow.
Also, this site down here hasn’t linked to them either.
Now, if I click through to the article, you’ll see a bunch of ads that appears to be somewhat
of a spammy site.
And the author of the site is this so called “Natasha”....
Or maybe Ivan?
I don’t know.
Alright, the next hack is a really cool one, but before I show you this, in the words of Google:
“Don’t be evil.”
This search query helps you find specific file types that you probably don’t want
to be in Google’s index.
Now, a good example of this is if you use lead magnets or content upgrades to generate
new leads.
You’d probably want to protect these assets by correctly configuring your robots.txt file.
You can check your site by doing something like this:
site: then your domain, so I’ll use ahrefs.com and then filetype:pdf or whatever file extensions
you might have on your server.
And you can see some pdfs that I don’t think are supposed to be in here.
So if you have any lead magnets or offers, search your own website for different file extensions.
And it goes without saying that you shouldn’t be uploading files with sensitive information.
The next search query is to find some brilliant ideas for your YouTube thumbnails.
Now, these search operators also work for Google images and video searches.
So, if we go to Google images and type in site:youtube.com and then type in something
like “chicken soup” as a phrase match, then you’ll see a bunch of search results.
But why not just do this in YouTube?
Well, for me personally, I prefer using a face on thumbnails.
And Google has the perfect filter for this to get your creative juices flowing.
Just click on tools, then type, and choose face.
And just like that, I now have thumbnails that fit my style that I can use as inspiration
when I create my next thumbnail.
Next up on our list is to find guest posting opportunities.
And it’s really simple.
You can just type in something like a generic topic related to your niche like fitness,
then intitle:"write for us" in quotes and inurl:write-for-us.
Now this query has 3 conditions:
It’s going to look for pages where the word fitness appears on the page.
It’s going to look for titles that say “write for us” as a phrase match.
And it’s going to find URLs that include “write-for-us.”
And right away, you can see that the results seem pretty relevant.
You can also use different phrases than “write for us” like become a contributor,
contribute to, or write for me.
Or you can just search for them all at once by doing a query like this:
fitness intitle:"write for us" OR intitle:"write for me" OR intitle:"become a contributor".
Mix and match these combos and see what gives you the best results.
An even easier way to find guest posts is to type inurl:author/
then the author’s name, so I’ll use tim-soulo.
And now, I can see about a dozen or so sites that Tim has posted on.
Now, since Tim works at Ahrefs, I know with certainty that he doesn’t own most, if not
all of these sites.
So this is a clear indication that these blogs all accept or have accepted guest posts in the past
You can also do this in Content Explorer quite easily.
I’ll just type in author:"Tim Soulo" -site:ahrefs.com and I’ll also exclude bloggerjet.com, which
is his personal blog.
And it looks like we have around the same number of results as Google, but with a bunch
of rich metrics to help you pick your guest blogging sites based on data.
Now with Content Explorer, it won’t always work with the author tag because it depends
on whether we’re able to pick up the author for a post or not.
And blog posts don't always include the author's name.
But there’s another cool thing you can do.
If you have a site that you really want to write for, then you can type in site:ahrefs.com
and then exclude some common authors.
So in this case, I would exclude Tim Soulo and Joshua Hardwick who are regular writers
for the Ahrefs blog.
Scrolling through the results, you can see that there were multiple authors for our blog
even though we don’t have a “write for us” page.
Alright, the next query helps you find resource and round ups for link building.
Now, this is one of the easiest link building tactics to pull off because people are essentially
curating content with the intention to connect their readers with the best resources around
the web on a specific topic.
So in Google, you can type:
Intitle:your keyword, so I’ll type in fitness again intitle:resources inurl:resources.
And you’ll see that there are some good pages in here that match our query, but they
seem to be more like list posts rather than a typical “resources” page.
So you’d have to play around with the query, which will highly depend on your industry,
topics, or niche.
An even easier way to do this is to pick one of your biggest competitors who has a lot
of backlinks to their site.
Then you take their domain and enter it into Site Explorer tool.
So I’ll type in healthline.com since we already saw that they have a ton of backlinks.
Now, assuming I have a blog that covers most of the topics that they do, I can just go
to the backlinks report.
And then I’ll type in “resources” in the search box.
After it loads, you can see all of the pages that mention the word “resources” in the
titles or URLs.
And if you want to narrow this down further, you can use the “Type” filter to only
show dofollow links.
Doing a domain level search will show you the most results, but you can also do this
at the page level.
For example, if I enter in the URL of the page on “how to lose weight”, you can
see that they have over 1,500 websites linking to them.
So I could basically do the same thing and probably extract a few resource pages, links
pages, or round up pages to pitch my own weight loss article.
Okay!
The next query is going to help you find all of the social profiles of a person that you
want to reach out to.
Just type in something like this:
tim soulo ahrefs, and then in parentheses,
(site:twitter.com OR site:facebook.com OR site:linkedin.com).
We’re basically isolating our searches down to pages from these 3 social media networks
where they include the name of the person as well as the company that they’re at.
But as you can see, people’s tweets get indexed too.
So we can just add minus inurl:/status/, which will remove individual tweets.
Now, if you wanted to email them, but you weren’t able to find their email address
through a third party tool, then you might be able to find it in a tweet.
So, if I type in site:twitter.com inurl:timsoulo, which is his twitter handle, and then intext:gmail.com,
then we can see if Tim has ever tweeted his Gmail address.
And it looks like he has one tweet just like this.
The next search query is to find sites that feature infographics.
Now, creating high quality infographics is a great way to get new backlinks and it’s
super easy to find link prospects or places where we can publish our infographic as a
guest post.
So I’ll type in fitness, which is my example topic, then intitle:infographic inurl:infographic.
You can also do this with popular infographics that you know of.
For example, I can delete the generic keyword here and paste in "Reddit’s guide to fitness"
wrapped in quotes.
And you can see that there are significantly less results, but they’re quite focused.
Now, finding places to get your infographic published is much easier using Content Explorer.
For example, I can type in, title: then within brackets, I’ll type in SEO OR “link building”
OR “keyword research”) AND title:”[infographic].”
Now, the reason why I’m adding the word “infographic” in square brackets to the
title is because it’s very common footprint that sites use when publishing infographics.
So I’ll run the search now.
And you can see that we have around 900 results that have published infographics on topics
related to our niche.
It’s important to note that Google actually ignores the square brackets, while Content
Explorer doesn’t.
So you’ll see that the results set here is much more relevant than Google’s, at least for marketers.
This final query is an easy one, but it’s super useful.
This search query helps you find opportunities to add internal links.
Now, adding internal links from powerful pages on your site or pages that are already getting
traffic can help decrease your bounce rate and give you a nice rankings boost.
So let’s say that we want to pass some link equity from some of our other pages to our
SEO tips article.
We can type in site:ahrefs.com/blog/ -site: and the exact url of our seo tips post.
Then I’ll add the keyword “seo tips” as a phrase match.
This is going to show us any pages on our blog that includes the phrase “seo tips,”
but not the page that we want to link to.
And it looks like we have a few potential posts that we can link from.
Now, I’m sure you can see how powerful these search operators are.
So play around with these and try some of the other search operators that weren’t
mentioned in this video.
We have a massive list of 40+ search operators in our blog post, which I’ll leave a link
to in the description.
Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
And hey, if you've got some good combos up your sleeve, then don’t hoard them all to yourself.
Leave a comment and share them with the rest of us here in the Ahrefs community.
I would personally love to hear about them.
So keep grinding away and I'll see you in the next video.