9 powerful Google Search Operators listed

Let's dive in quickly.

Determine how many indexed URLs a Web site has with 'site:'

With the Search Operator site:, you can see how many URLs Google has indexed from your website or from any other website you want to know about.

So you can also do this from your competitors or, for example, for the client you work for. In practice, this will look like this.

Now you may be thinking, "Why is this convenient? Well, for the following reasons:

• You can see if Google has indexed your entire website.
• You can also use the site: operator specifically by page. Then you can see if a page is indexed.
• You can use this to spy on competitors to see what content they all have on their websites.
• You can also combine the site: operator with a keyword, so you can determine within which pages a keyword is used

And the latter looks like this:

Find out which sites use certain words in the title with 'allintitle:'

With the allintitle Search Operator, you can find out which pages have a particular keyword or multiple keywords in their SEO title.

This can be useful for, among other things:

• Your link building strategy
• Finding out the competition on a particular keyword
• When you search for a page but can't remember exactly where it is (from competitors or from your own website if it consists of thousands of pages)

This Search Operator is also still sometimes used when calculating KEI, but that is no longer accurate because Google looks at more than just your SEO title.

Remove irrelevant information from your search results by excluding keywords

When you use Google, you want to find the right thing. You can also partly control this yourself by excluding a particular keyword from your search.

Suppose you are searching for the keyword "gates" in English. Chances are you're going to see all kinds of information about Bill Gates.

You can then exclude the word "Bill" from your search to make sure you don't see any more information about Bill Gates.

Find related websites with 'related:'

With the Google Search Operator related: you can see which websites are related to your website or your client's, for example.

This feature hardly works in the Netherlands, but for English searches/websites it does. Very useful if you want to know in a certain niche who the competitors are or which sites to keep an eye on.

Find out if your keyword is in the URL with 'allinurl:'

This is one that I don't see come by often, but is incredibly powerful. Namely, the Search Operator "allinurl" allows you to see which Web sites have a keyword or certain keyword in their URL.

This is actually exactly the same as the allintitle:, but for the URL.

So with this you can also see who your competitors are and how fierce the competition is present. Furthermore, you can also use this, for example, for your link building strategy.

Get the last cached variant of a page from Google with 'cache:'

This is one that is especially super interesting for marketers and SEO specialists. Namely, with cache: you can retrieve the last cached variant of a URL/website.

Next, you can:

• See what the page looks like
• See when this page was last indexed

But you can also poke around in the source code to see why Google included an incorrect meta description for your page.

Because maybe you've already modified it in the back-end of your website, but so it's not found in Google yet. And so you still need to submit your page to Google Search Console.

Unlike the other Search Operators, you go directly to the page of your website and so I cannot show a screenshot, as I did with the other operators.

But this is all you have to fill in: cache:[FILL IN YOUR URL HERE].

Find out which pages the keyword is on with 'allintext:'

The allintext: operator is equivalent to the allintitle and the allinurl. The difference here is in that allintext looks for the keywords in the regular text of a page.

Nothing more and nothing less.

Check that content words are copied with quotation marks

With quotation marks around a sentence, you can check if someone 'accidentally' used that sentence. So, among other things, you can use this to find out who stole content or find out where a quote came from.

Just do this on your most popular blogs/landing pages and see if you come across anything. This Search Operator from Google looks at the text, the title, as well as the meta description.

Have Google search broadly with 'OR'

With the Search Operator OR, you tell Google, so to speak, that your search query may contain one word or the other.

Just a concrete example. Suppose you start looking for SEO training. This can also be called an SEO course.

Then, by adding OR, you can put Google to work tracking down both keywords. Saves you from searching twice again ;).