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How to Use Advanced Search Operators for SEO Link Building

18th November 2018 - SEO
How to Use Advanced Search Operators for SEO Link Building

Google has totally transformed as a search engine from 1999 when it used to take a full month to crawl about 50 million pages on the web. It also totally dominates the search industry, getting as many as 78% of all the searches performed throughout the world on the internet.

But as Google grows and turns into something bigger and more powerful, it also makes it difficult to do SEO effectively. However, there are certain advanced search operators that can help you find some great link building opportunities, so let’s get right to.

Allinanchor

The “allinanchor” search operator helps you find all the webpages that are linking to another webpage using a particular anchor text. For example, searching for “allinanchor:Best SEO company” will get you all the pages that are linking out to another website using “best SEO company” as the anchor text.

Allintext

This search operator allows you to find webpages that have some specific text on them. For instance, if you search for “allintext:SEO Optimizers checklist”, then you will find all results that mention the words “SEO Optimizers checklist” on their page.

Allintitle

This search operator works just like the above one, but limits itself to the title. So if you search for “allintitle:detect plagiarism”, then you will find all pages that have the words “detect plagiarism” in their title.

AllinURL

Again, like allintext and allintitle, allinURL helps you find results that mention some particular words in their URL. So for an example, performing a search for “allinURL:Google FAQ” will fetch all results that have the words “Google” and “FAQ” in their URL.

All the above search operators can go a long way in helping you find and understand your competition better. Let’s move on to some more advanced stuff now.

Finding Backlinks

One of the most effective ways of getting quality backlinks is to replicate those of your competitors. And to find the backlinks of your competitors, you can simply use the search operator “link:xyz.com -site:xyz.com”.

Please note that you need to replace the “xyz.com” here with the URL of your competitor’s site.

Guest Posting Opportunities

Guest posting has been one of the most evergreen ways of building quality backlinks. To find guest posting opportunities in your niche, simply use the following search operators:

Your keyword guest post

Your keyword “guest blog”

Your keyword “write for us”

Your keyword “become a contributor”

Similarly, here the “your keyword” can also be replaced with your competitor in order to directly find the sites they have used for guest posting.

Research Link Building

In certain niches, there are resource pages that make a list of lots of useful sites in the niche. Getting a link from such pages can be very helpful for your site’s rankings.

To find these opportunities, you need to use the following search operators:

Keyword “top resources” or “top 10 resources”

Keyword “top sites”

Keyword “top articles”

Keyword “favorite resources”

Keyword “useful articles”

A good way to find many more such opportunities in your niche without having to do a lot of legwork is find one of the sites that has got these resource links, and check its backlinks to find all the other resource pages they have got a link from.

Google infographic

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