Google search operators are great for finding what you want online when a simple search won’t return what you’re looking for. For instance, if you’re looking to get backlinks from authoritative sites like a .GOV or .EDU, you can use search operators to sift through millions and billions of web pages to find what you’re looking for quickly without wasting any time. It’s especially effective for finding backlinks for your site, checking out competitors backlink profiles, etc. In this article I’m going to cover how to use Google search operators, particularly the most common ones you might use to find exactly what you’re looking for when a simple Google search won’t cut it.

How to Use Google Search Operators

Site: – This is one of the most common Google search operators which is useful for finding any type of site whether that’s in extension or if you want to profile a specific website.

inurl: – This finds URLs which all have whichever keyword you’re looking for. The same goes for “intitle:”.

Plus – You can use the “+” character to link multiple footprints or Google search operators together because it’s likely that your operator is more substantial than just something like “site:.edu”. You’re probably looking for something more specific than a .EDU site, and the plus sign allows you to add that to your operator.

Minus – Conversely, the “-” character is for removing keywords from your search. If you’re looking for blogs to comment on, you obviously want to exclude blogs which may have allowed comments at one point but are currently closed. Most blogs use the footprint “comments closed” or “comments are closed” when that’s the case, so use a -“comments are closed” as part of your Google search operator.

Lastly, remember to always put each component of the operator in quotation marks when/if it is more than a single word.

Also, think about coupling your Google search operators with a powerful scraping tool like Scrapebox to save yourself a lot of time in finding potential high quality match sites to your query en masse.