The search engines provide important search capabilities that everyone should know about when analyzing their company’s listings or when analyzing their competition’s listings.
To check the pages the search engines have indexed for a domain, search:
site:www.mydomain.com
These are the pages that will possibly show up in the search engine results. You can click to see the cached version of the page, and click again to see the cached text. This shows you the content the search engines see.
If there’s nothing there, you have a problem. You can also use this search to see if the search engines have the latest version of your page cached.
To check the back links of your domain, search:
In Google: link:www.mydomain.com
In Yahoo: link:http://www.mydomain.com
MSN Search does not support the link: command as of 2007. Yahoo! and Google return a sample of the total results, and Google usually returns the smallest sample.
This has nothing to do with the links that the search engines actually know about. If you want more results from Google, you can try making a plain old search for your domain minus your sites pages:
www.mydomain.com –site:mydomain.com
Better yet, you can submit a Google sitemap and get a listing of links to your site.
There are other types of queries that aren’t as useful for SEO purposes, but are still good to use on occasion. Some of them are: intitle, allintitle, inurl, allinurl, intext, inanchor, cache, daterange, filetype, and related.
You can find information about these from Google. You might use these search functions to find sites that will link to yours. A few popular ones are:
important keyword inurl:links
important keyword intitle:directory
free directory intitle:”important keyword”
