by SEO Consultant
S. Inarejos
Changes on the site commandS. Inarejos
Have eagle eyed searchers here at Bigmouthmedia been the first to notice a significant change on search results when the site command is used on Google.com? The search engine giant has introduced a date filter on the main search page, whereby you can select pages indexed from a specific domain within a certain time interval. The intervals available are: past year, past 6, 3 or 2 months, past month, past week, past 24 hours or anytime. Crucially this feature was already available from the Advanced Search but this is the first time that it has been seen on the main Google Search results.
This change has not been rolled out across all Google sites, it is only partially available on Google US - this is normal procedure when testing new features or changes to the user interface.
The site: command is one of several advanced web search operators supported not only by Google, but also by Yahoo! and MSN. Its main purpose is to retrieve search engine results indexed from a specific domain. With this Google test detected by Bigmouthmedia, users will be able to restrict Google search results to certain periods of time directly from the main web results.
What is an Advanced Operator?
Advanced operators are really useful in terms of diagnosis if your site is not performing well enough on the SERPS. They can serve to clarify which pages are on search engine indexes, but also the related pages and restrict results to webpages with some words in the title [allintitle:], [intitle:] or url [allinurl], [inurl]. Even with more random functions like [define:] to retrieve a definition or [stocks:] for financial information.
Other Advanced Operators
The site command is one of eleven advanced operators available in Google. For instance by introducing the query [cache:] followed by the URL of your choice, you will get to see a snapshot of the web page saved on Google's cache along with the date when the Googlebot found it. The cache command is incredibly useful if you would like to know what search engines can see from your website, as very frequently crawlers struggle to access and or index all the content on a website.
By introducing the [link:] followed by your chosen website, you can gain an insight into other websites that are linking to it. The link command is highly inaccurate on Google and it will only display a small proportion of websites which are linking to the specified site. This can't be considered a mistake, but rather an intentional inaccuracy. Google only wants to show this information if you are the administrator of the site. The best way to get accurate information in terms of external links from Google is via the Webmasters Console.
By introducing the different advanced operators on Google, MSN and Yahoo! you will notice a big difference in terms of pages indexed on a site, or links reported.
You can try your luck and see if you are part of this Google experiment by simply entering [site:www.example.com] on Google search results. Please note that you shouldn't be entering any spaces between the semicolon and the domain name. If you see the drop down menu on the right hand side as shown in the picture, enjoy the trial, if not you can still see this feature in action within the Advance Search filters.
