How To Diagnose Your Site with Google Advanced Search

October 7th, 2008 by Ann Smarty | 13 Comments

While John Mueller did a great job explaining how to analyze your website with Google Webmaster Tools, 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.

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;
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;
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)

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);
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)

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”]

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

Comments

13 responses so far ↓

Toma Bonciu on Oct 7, 2008 at 4:40 am

Hi,

I found this information very usefull. I have on my newest website a canonical problem that I’ll have to solve it.

Thank you
Software Testing on Oct 7, 2008 at 5:16 am

@Ann, any idea on how google compiles the related list of websites for “related:yourdomain.com” search query?
Ann Smarty on Oct 7, 2008 at 5:35 am

@Software Testing, related sites are those that have backlinks from similar pages as your site (sites that tend to get reference along with your site).
Seo Web Design Services on Oct 7, 2008 at 6:31 am

Thanks Ann

There was a couple of keyword searches there I didn’t know about.

thanks again

Mike
Mercy on Oct 7, 2008 at 8:29 am

Identify most powerful pages of your site - is the one I am not aware of it. Great I found it across now!
The Financial Blog on Oct 7, 2008 at 3:06 pm

Thank you, Ann. This was most helpful
nofollow on Oct 7, 2008 at 4:02 pm

Is this a stale document or a fresh one? To a new born child everything is new. However, it was useful to go over the major google advanced search functions.
Amit on Oct 7, 2008 at 5:35 pm

Very nice post there Anne.
Article Towards on Oct 7, 2008 at 11:48 pm

Nice post, i don’t know how to use this command before i read this post. Google have a lot function on this day.
CAP DigiSoft Solutions on Oct 8, 2008 at 1:44 am

Hi Ann,
The websites which are displayed for this “related:yourdomain.com” is almost the competitor for our website?

Also when i try to use “Check your site is crawled and indexed frequently enough” with date range options, the date displayed here and the one shown for cache:yourdomain.com are not the same. Also i am not able to get results for the options in the date range (Past 24 hours, Past week, past month, past year). Kindly explain the same with some examples.
Ann Smarty on Oct 8, 2008 at 3:44 am

“the date displayed here and the one shown for cache:yourdomain.com are not the same”

cache date and index date can be different; that might mean that Google came but found no new data to save a new copy.

“Also i am not able to get results for the options in the date range (Past 24 hours, Past week, past month, past year)”

I don’t think I understand the issue.
Tanner Christensen on Oct 10, 2008 at 10:10 am

Surprisingly helpful tips.

I think the most helpful of all these tips is the first one: making sure your website isn’t being impacted by any filters.

As for related:yourdomain.com showing competitors: it’s not really competitors that will show up, but more like resources where your competitors might associate themselves.
Software Testing Training on Nov 4, 2008 at 8:22 am

Hi
I like quarkbase though. I am using it to get information about websites i find interesting. Seems to be more than just seo.

http://www.crestech.in