Google Suggest and the ’site:’ operator
Whenever I run a ’site:’ search on Google I’m intrigued by the auto-complete given by Google Suggest:
The search suggestions it comes up with is one of the typical searches people do to try and find the strongest pages on a particular domain (site:mydomain.com mydomain).
Does this mean that Walmart are very interested in what pages on their domain have the most power or does it mean people are looking for strong pages to get links from Walmart?
Taking this a bit further, let’s look at what happens when we add another letter, e.g. ‘o’
Hmm.. anyone think ‘office supplies’ is quite a competitive term (hint: guess who are number 1 and 3 on Google.com)?
How about another letter, say ‘c’:
And how about ‘b’:
I’m seeing a pattern. Let’s try one more, say ‘l’
Anyone spot it? Your clue: two words “Bald SEO“.
Yup, except for the generic ’site:’ operator, Google suggest seems to have a large number of Tribune properties (Orlando Sentinel, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, LA Times + Blog).
Sorry Brent – we know what you are up to!
I am teaching my journalists well. Teach hundreds about the site: operator and it is bound to happen right. Plus, look at the crazy amount of duplicate content that we are still churning out (unfortunately) and you’ll see why it’s important that I discover the strongest pages for a particular phrase on a particular domain.
I have to hand it to you on your knowledge of which domains are Tribune owned though . . . not even the Google Algo has figured that out yet. Could it be you are smarter than Google? Shutter to think!
Payne . . . the BaldSEO anchor text was classic btw.
Stephen Holmes once again cracking mysteries on behalf of the SEO community – of course he is smarter than Google Brent!
Ah – would you rather have BaldSEO as one word or as two words “Bald SEO”?
I imagine the “site:mydomain.com mydomain” queries are people typing in the brand name and then clicking “Show more results from mydomain.com” in the listings
@Oli Allen
Hmmm… I’m not sure about that. I could see why you might get that with “site:mydomain.com somekeyword” but I kinda think the “site:mydomain.com mydomain” is more likely to be a domain research query used by SEOs.