Using site: in Google is something that we all do from time to time particularly when considering the SEO of our websites. Here are some tips to get the most from this command.
When you perform as site search in Google, it’s best to do this without the www. at the beginning of the URL (site:yoursite.com and not site:www.yoursite.com) This will help you see all pages from all sub domains and can help to identify if there is a canonical issue on the site. Finding these issues can help you ensure that Google is not finding duplicate versions of your website (the www. and non www. versions or a home page canonical issue) and resolve them with the correct redirects or a canonical tag.
Using the Site command can help you identify the pages of your website that Google sees as the most important. This can help you to see if the Contact Us or Privacy pages on your site are too heavily promoted. Google tends to place the pages it sees as most important towards the top of the results when a site: search is performed. So, if your Contact Us or Privacy page is listed as the second result in a site: search then this could mean that you have too many internal links to these pages and this is stopping Google from seeing your product or services pages as important.
The Site search results for your site can be used in conjunction with Google Webmaster Tools to identify duplicate title tags, meta descriptions or pages which don’t have either a title tag or meta description. Ensuring your site has unique title tags and meta descriptions for every page of your website helps with rankings for your website as each page is seen as having something unique to offer to the search engines and your visitors.
You can also use the results from a site search to ensure that there isn’t any kind of spider trap on your website, to ensure that the search engines are able to find all of the pages on your website, and aren’t getting caught in a series of loops on the site finding URLs of pages which don’t exist. The key to getting good rankings is ensuring that Google is seeing real content on your website, finding new pages and not getting stuck looking at an infinite number of “fake” pages on your site.
Another useful benefit of performing a site search is finding pages in the results which shouldn’t be there. For example if you have a folder for the CMS of your site (for example www.yoursite.com/admin) and this has been indexed then you need to revise your robot.txt file to ensure that the search engines are only looking at pages you want them to see on your website.
The site search functionality in Google is incredibly powerful for webmasters as it can tell you a lot about how your website is seen by the search engines and can help your resolve any issues you have on your website. You can also use this command, as above in Bing and Yahoo to help with listings is these engines too.
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