Keyword difficulty

• When building a web page, it can be useful to know how competitive the keyword is that you are going after, yet this can be difficult to obtain.
• The intitle: operator shows pages that are more focused on your search term than the pages returned without that operator (e.g., intitle:"dress boots").
• You can use different ratios to give you a sense of how competitive a keyword market is (higher results mean that it is more competitive). For example: dress boots (20,900,000) versus “dress boots” (424,000) versus intitle:"dress boots" (37,000) Ratio: 20,900/37 = 565:1 Exact phrase ratio: 424/37 = 11:1 Another significant parameter you can look at is the inanchor: operator; for example, inanchor:"dress boots".
• You can use this operator in the preceding equation instead of the intitle: operator.

Using number ranges

• The number range operator can help restrict the results set to a set of model numbers, product numbers, price ranges, and so forth.
• For example: site:stevespanglerscience.com "product/1700..1750" Unfortunately, the number range combined with inurl: is not supported. So, the product number must be on the page. The number range operator is also great for copyright year searches (to find abandoned sites to acquire). Combine it with the intext: operator to improve the signal-to-noise ratio; for example, intext:"copyright 1993..2005" -2008 blog.

Advanced doc type search

• The filetype: operator is useful for looking for needles in haystacks. Here are a couple of examples: confidential business plan -template filetype:doc forrester research grapevine filetype:pdf

Determine listing age

• You can label results with dates that give a quick sense of how old (and thus trusted) each listing is; for example, by appending the &as_qdr=m199 parameter to the end of a Google SERP URL, you can restrict results to those within the past 199 months.

Uncover subscriber-only or deleted content

• You can get to subscriber-only or deleted content from the Cached link in the listing in the SERPs or by using the cache: operator.

• Don’t want to leave a footprint? Add &strip=1 to the end of the Google cached URL. Images on the page won’t load. If no Cached link is available, use Google Translate to take your English document and translate it from Spanish to English (this will reveal the content even though no Cached link is available):

  https://translate.google.com/translate?prev=&hl=en&u=URL-GOES-HERE&sl=es&tl=en Identify neighborhoods

• The related: operator will look at the sites linking (the “Linking Sites”) to the specified site, and then see which other sites are commonly linked to by the Linking Sites. This list is usually limited to between 25 and 31 results.

• These are commonly referred to as neighborhoods, as there is clearly a strong relationship between sites that share similar link graphs.

Find Creative Commons (CC) licensed content

• Use the as_rights parameter in the URL to find Creative Commons licensed content. Here are some example scenarios to find CC-licensed material on the Web: Permit commercial use.
• https://google.com/search?as_rights=(cc_publicdomain|cc_attribute|cc_sharealike|cc_nonderived).-(cc_noncommercial)&q=KEYWORDS
• Permit derivative works https://google.com/search?as_rights=(cc_publicdomain|cc_attribute|cc_sharealike| cc_noncommercial).-(cc_nonderived)&q=KEYWORDS Permit commercial and derivative use https://google.com/search?as_rights=(cc_publicdomain|cc_attribute|cc_sharealike).- (cc_noncommercial|cc_nonderived)&q=KEYWORDS
• Make sure you replace KEYWORDS with the keywords that will help you find content that is of relevance to your site. The value of this to SEO is an indirect one. Creative Commons content can potentially be a good source of content for a website.