Welcome to Issue #36 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. Today I want to talk about special searches you can do in Google that gives you insight on how Google views your site. Try entering the following commands into the Google search box and replace
example.com with your website URL.
- site:example.com This will show you all the pages Google has indexed on your site. There are a few variations of this special search:
- site:example.com/products This will show you the pages indexed in the subdirectory products
- site:blog.example.com This will show you the pages indexed in the subdomain blog.example.com
- site:example.com -site:example.com/products (notice the space before the –site) This will show you all the pages indexed in example.com minus the pages indexed in the products subdirectory.
- site:example.com –site:blog.example.com This will show you all the pages indexed in example.com minus the pages indexed in the subdomain blog.example.com
- link:example.com This will show you all the sites linking to your site. Here are some variations of this search:
- link:example.com/mypage.html Show sites with links to a specific page on your site
- link:example.com/products Show sites with links to a subdirectory on your site
- link:blog.example.com Show sites with links to a subdomain on your site
- cache:example.com This will show you the cached version of your page that is seen when someone clicks the Cached link under your site info in a Google search. At the top of this page Google will tell you when it cached this page as well include a link the text only version of this page. Clicking this link will show you the text only version which is how the Google crawler (Googlebot) sees your page.
- related:example.com This will show a list of sites that Google has determined is similar to yours. They use an unknown magic spell to make this decision but do state that the quality of similar sites does not impact your ranking or how your site is indexed.
You can use these searches to keep track of how Google is indexing your site. The site: command shows the total number of pages indexed at the top of the page. You should check this periodically to make sure the number is growing as you add more content and especially that it is not decreasing which indicates a problem.
With the link: command, you can also track the total number at the top to see if more sites are linking to your site. You can see when you create new content, how quickly others link to it by watching the overall number grow for that particular subdirectory or page. And lastly, you can use this command to view some of the top entries to see what others are saying about your site.
Regards,
Mark Maunder.
Feedjit Founder & CEO
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info@technologyguide.com 28 Sep, 2010