Search Engine Commands
Most often used by search
engine professionals such as search engine optimizers -
very few others know about these search engine commands.
Knowing them can really bring information about a specific
site and its standing in the World Wide Web to light. Here
are some of the most important and generally supported commands:
Site: -
Displays all of the pages indexed by the engine of the site.
Link: - Locates some links pointing to
the site.
Cache: - Shows the last indexed and cached
version of a site.
Info: - Displays general info about a site
with other search commands.
Related: - Shows websites that may be semantically
or directly related to the site.
Editor's Note: The
above commands all work from the Google search form. Examples
of typical usage would be as follows:
site:http://www.yourtie.info
info:http://www.yourtie.info
related:http://www.yourtie.info
etc..
Some, but not all, of these
commands will work in Yahoo!
and MSN
as well as some other search engines.
Google
Webmaster Tools
Google's Webmaster Tools
are a godsend. Once verified as the owner via Meta tag or
HTML file, you have access to a wide variety of information
from sitemaps, to links, to anchor text, to crawl rates
and errors. Best of all, GWT are always expanding the information
that is being provided and is sure to provide more great
features in the near future. In the meantime, I will keep
using it and so should you.
Site
Explorer
Yahoo Site Explorer is a
handy tool, similar to Google Webmaster tools but not as
robust yet, that can provide some helpful information about
a site. It can display all pages in the Yahoo index which
is always helpful in finding indexation and duplicate content
issues. But Site Explorer's bread and butter is its "Inlinks"
feature which is the most comprehensive external link reporting
tool available via search engine. The links can be filtered
by domains and URL's, but most importantly, they are sorted
from most important to least. Best of all, you can export
all of the data to a TSV file
