Advanced Search Operators For SEO Link Building

First things first, Google has went from being just another “Internet” company to a super sophisticated, advanced and powerful search engine. And while that has apparently improved the quality of search results it offers to its users tremendously, it has also affected the way SEO should be done just as much.

With the old spam SEO techniques no longer “cutting it,” it’s probably about time the SEO community steps up their SEO game. And if you’re here, we are certainly going to help you do that by walking you through some great advanced link building tactics.

Using Search Operators for Advanced Link Building

Allinanchor: This is a great way to find websites that are linking to another website using a specific anchor text. For instance, searching for “allinachor:Best SEO Company” in Google will pull up all pages that are linking to a website using the anchor text “Best SEO Company.”

Needless to say, this can be a great way to find link building targets in your niche.

Allintext: This is similar to the above search operator, but instead of searching for a specific anchor text, you will be searching for specific words in the text of pages. So for example, searching for “allintext:SEO Checklist” will help you find all pages that have the words “SEO” and “Checklist” in their text.

Allintitle: This one should be pretty self-explanatory, but just for the sake of explaining it will find you pages that have a specific text in their title.

Allinurl: Pretty much the same as the ones above, except that it will fetch you results that have the text you’re searching for in their URLs.

Author: Trying to find newsgroup articles from Google Groups that have been written by a particular author? The “author” search operator is going to come in handy and you just have to type in “author:Rand Fishkin (replace it with the author you’re searching for)” and you will be able to find all articles written by them that are available online.

Define: This is kind of similar to the above search operator but it will help you find definitions to different terms. For example “define:blog” will tell you what the term “blog” is defined as.

Intext and Intitle: These are very similar to the “Allintext” and “Allintitle” Google search operators, but these are more flexible in the sense that they allow you to search for a specific word or words while the other words can be mentioned anywhere on the page.

To make it a little more clear, let’s use an example for each of them. So if you search for, say, “Rand Fishkin intext:SEO,” you will find pages that have SEO in their text but the words “Rand” and “Fishkin” may be mentioned anywhere on the page. Similarly, searching for “SEO guide intitle:help” will pull up results that have the word “help” in their title bu the words “SEO” and “guide” can be anywhere on the page, including the text.