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Article | How To Diagnose Your Site with Google Advanced Search

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Saved by 2 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-10-07


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Highlighted by suzannah

on 2008-10-14 by suzannah

Smarty, Ann. 2008. How To Diagnose Your Site with Google Advanced Search. Blog. Search Engine Journal. October 7. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-diagnose-your-site-with-google-advanced-search/7795/.

I thought I could outline a few tips on how to diagnose both on-site and off-site issues with Google Search and its advanced operators.

Highlighted by suzannah

Make sure your site is free from any type of filtering issues: search [yourdomain.com] in Google; if your sites comes up #1 for this query, you are doing alright. If you see other site mentioning your domain ranked first, that’s a bad signal;

Highlighted by suzannah

Make sure there are no duplicate content problems: search for a pretty long citation from your site (exact match, i.e. in quotes). With a blog, for example, you have a good chance to see the category page (summarizing the post) instead of the corresponding post page;

Highlighted by suzannah

  • Check how many URLs from your site have been indexed: search [site:yourdomain.com] and “dig deeper” into the search results:

    • [site:yourdomain.com/subdirectory1] + [site:yourdomain.com/subdirectory2] + etc (the “deeper” you digg, the more/ the more accurate results you get)

    Highlighted by suzannah

    Learn if the site has canonical problems (for sites using www): search [site:yourdomain.com -inurl:www] and see if any non-www URLs have been stored in the index);

    Highlighted by suzannah

  • Identify most powerful pages of your site:

    • [ www site:yourdomain.com]
    [ tld site:yourdomain.tld]
    [inurl:domain site:yourdomain.com]
    [domain site:yourdomain.com]

    (kudos to SEOmoz for the tip)

    Highlighted by suzannah

  • Identify most powerful pages of your site (keyword-dependent): search [site:yourdomain.com inanchor:keyword];
  • (based on the previous one) Find sites with most potential (to further promote them):

    • [site:yourdomain.com inanchor:”key * word”]
    [site:yourdomain.com intitle:”key * phrase”]

    Highlighted by suzannah

  • Find most relevant pages of your site (to further promote them for the specified term): search [site:yourdomain.com keyword] or [site:yourdomain.com key * phrase]

    • Highlighted by suzannah

    Check your site is crawled and indexed frequently enough: search [site:yourdomain.com] + play with “date range” advanced search option.

    Highlighted by suzannah

    Check who (and what) your site is associated with: search [related:yourdomain.com] to identify your site co-citation (i.e. basically, who your promoters also link to).

    Highlighted by suzannah