Site Search
A site search is an option provided by Google where you can generate a listing of all subpages, which can be found for a domain in a search engine index. Thus, you can see the whole spectrum of a website without much effort. Moreover, this list can be filtered as desired.
Procedure
You generate the listing of the indexed pages directly through the search engine. The search command is entered just like a regular search in the search box. The difference being that you are not searching for a phrase but a URL. By entering
site: URL
you will get a listing of all discoverable subdomains for this URL in the index. You can then filter this listing by entering the applicable command.
site: www.mydomain.com
Filtering of indexed pages
There are several ways to filter the results for a site search:
- Indexed pages and subdomains
- site: example.com
- Indexed pages and subdomains with www.
- site: www.example.com
- Indexed pages that contain the search term in the text or domain
- site: example.com “keyword”
- Indexed pages that contain the keyword in the domain (inurl search)
- site: example.de inurl: “keyword”
- Indexed pages that contain the search term in the text
- site: example.de intext: “keyword”
- Indexed pages with the appropriate file extension
- site: example.com file type: “entension”
Site search site as an SEO tool
Having an overview of all subpages of a website is of benefit for search engine optimization and facilitates orientation in a complex site structure. By a comparison between the existing subpages and those listed in the index, you can detect weaknesses and possibly even entire problem areas within a website. The object of SEO is to find the reasons for the lack of indexing and to correct it. Duplicate content could be a potential cause, for example. The number of subpages in the index is not an indication about traffic to a website. Thus, a domain with five subpages can have more traffic than one with 100 subpages. A site search merely provides information on the status of the indexing.