Shortcuts in Google Search

Have you ever wondered how to search Google for terms inside a specific website? Or find how many sites link to yours? Below is a list of common advanced search techniques with descriptions and examples:
Search for an exact phrase
"exact phrase to search"
Will return only results with the exact phrase.
Search within one website
site:www.website.com "search phrase"
This example searches through www.website.com for the phrase “search phrase”.
Search for link to a specific website
link:www.website.com
Will return all the websites that have a link to www.website.com.
Exclude words or phrases from search results
search phrase -excluded
Searches for the phrase but will only return results excluding the text after the minus sign.
View a cached version of a web page
cache:www.website.com
View a cached version of www.website.com
Search for a specific type of file
google ebook filetype:pdf
Searches for only PDF files containing ‘google ebook’
Search for phrase only in websites’ title tag
allintitle:"google articles"
Searches for web pages with “google articles” in the title tag.
Search for keyword only in website’s URL
inurl:googlearticles
Searches for pages with ‘googlearticles’ in the URL, including the domain name and subdomain or page names.
These are a great way to quickly search from Google’s home page, without having to click over to the advanced search.

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Google's SEO Starter Guide

Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, "What are some simple ways that I can improve my website's performance in Google?" There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it'd be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites' crawlability and indexing.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, "I'm new to SEO, how do I improve my site?", we can say, "Well, here's a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out."

Update on July 22, 2009: The SEO Starter Guide is now available in 40 languages!

• Arabic
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• English (GB)
• Filipino
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese (BR)
• Portuguese (PT)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Written by Brandon Falls, Search Quality Team

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