A cheatsheet to Google's advanced search operators
Every week I share no more than 3 hands-on resources that I carefully handpick from the top-experts and best practitioners in SEO and digital marketing. You won’t find FOMO inducing theories and convoluted predictions in these posts. I want to help you build long-lasting SEO and digital marketing strategies with proven methods you can implement today. Previous editions can be found here.
⏰ #NOW - WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO
As I am writing this week's edition, I'm on a train coming back from a BIG client presentation in Luxemburg. The kind of presentation I stood way too late to prepare 😅I'm happy to report it all went fine, and that I have missed nomadic working.I have also been trying to fit in a few hours to renew some industry certificates, and get a few new ones perhaps. I find it interesting to see how the world of certifications has evolved in the past years and their impact for clients and partnerships. I might write a piece on the subject.
👓 #FOCUS - THE ONE THING YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT
Dave Elliott from BuiltVisible put together a very handy cheatsheet about advanced search operators in Google and, more importantly, how to use them to find technical SEO issues and indexation errors. I found the most interesting part of the article was "How to use search operators for technical audits" where Dave explains how to:
Check your site with site:
Check if filler content has been indexed with site: and indexed:
Find duplicate titles with site: and intitle:
Check if non-secure pages have been indexed with site: and inurl:http or -inurl:https
Finding subdomains that you were not aware of
Finding all the non-html content on a site with filetype:
Find specific parameters that have been indexed with inurl:?ie=
Finding internal link opportunities by combining site:, -site: with the URL where you want to link to and intext: with the relevant search term.
Find URLs with a different domain
As you see, there are many easy ways to use Google Search operators to uncover issues in technical SEO and this article is covers a lot of it.Read "How to use Google advanced search operators to find indexation and technical SEO issues"
⚙️ #TOOL – Helping you up your game
Technical SEO audits are the best way to determine if your website's performance could be increased by upgrading its crawlability, adapting its international SEO tags, or making it a bit faster to load.As simple as it may sound, conducting a Technical SEO audit means you have to pay attention to what seems like a million details. Benjamin Estes from Distilled created a handy checklist to make sure you won't miss anything. What I found interesting with this checklist, is that it is made to help you answer questions, not just randomly check items with no context. Each row contains a problem you should check and find a solution for.Read "Comprehensive Technical SEO Audit"
🤓 #READ - THE BEST OF SEO BLOGS
Lucinda Southern from Digiday wrote an interesting piece on how publishers are reducing the number of articles they produce to grow larger audiences. Publishers like Le Monde or The Guardian cut their articles published by over 25% and saw and increase in traffic.
Publishers are moving away from last-touch attribution models that give full credit to the final article that a reader clicked on before signing up for subscription. - Lucinda Southern
Read "Publishers are growing audiences by producing less content"
Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to work on your website’s SEO? Would you be interested in having me talk at your conference or train your team?Here are the links to read more about me, check out my former experiences, find out more on the services I provide and contact me.
Latest editions of The Pragmatic SEO
Write Title Tags that Drive ClicksA Guide to Writing the Best Title Tags, an FAQ for Multiple Addresses on Google My Business, and a Place to Find all the Recent Talks in the Industry....18 February, 2020
How to Fix your Internal Linking MistakesFix Internal Linking Most Common Mistakes, A Complete Guide to UTM Tagging for Google My Business and a Chrome Extension for SEO....11 February, 2020
Learning Python for SEOAn introduction to Python for SEO, Optimizing your digital PR strategy and a cheat sheet for Excel formulas....04 February, 2020
