Google intitle and allintitle: How to Search Page Titles

So far, the words we search for show up anywhere on the page.

In the title, in the text, or even in the link.

But in SEO, one place carries special weight: the page title.

The title is the clearest signal of the phrase a page was built for.

So when you ask: "who has a page made specifically for the manual coffee grinder?", you don't want any page that mentions the phrase in one line. You want the pages that put it in their title.

That's what intitle: and allintitle: do.

intitle: a word that has to be in the title

Read it as: "pages with the word grinder in their title".

Let's compare it with a normal search on the same pages:

The Coffee Locator article is gone.

Why?

Its title is "Manual vs Electric Coffee Grinders". It says "grinders", not "grinder". The word "grinder" is only in the article's text, not in its title.

The same goes for the Coffee Parts page: "Grinders" in the title, "grinder" only in the text.

Real Google understands that grinders and grinder are the same word, so it might bring them up. The simulation applies the rule strictly, so you can see what the operator looks at.

Watch out: intitle takes one word

This is the most common mistake with this operator. Look at this query:

Lots of people think it means "the title has manual coffee grinder".

But no.

intitle: applies to the word stuck to it only: manual. After that, "coffee" and "grinder" are normal words that can be anywhere.

So a page titled "Manual Coffee Mill", with the word "grinder" in its text, will show up.

intitle with quotes: a phrase in the title

If you want a whole phrase in the title, put it between quotes:

Read it as: "this phrase, in the same order, in the title".

The same rule as the first lesson, only the place is now the title instead of the whole page.

allintitle: every word in the title

What if you want all three words in the title, but not necessarily in that order or next to each other?

allintitle: applies to every word after it. They all have to be in the title, in any order.

That means the same as writing intitle before every word:

The difference between the four

Now let's put them side by side on the same pages. Watch the pages that drop out from one table to the next:

Let's go through them one by one.

From 1 to 2: the eBay page "Coffee Grinder" is gone. "Manual" isn't in its title; it's only in the page's description.

From 2 to 3: the Coffee Locator article is gone. "Manual" and "Coffee" are in its title, but it says "Grinders", and "grinder" is only in the text.

From 3 to 4: the Livingetc article is gone. Its title has all three words, "Manual Vs Electric Coffee Grinder", so allintitle accepts it. But the exact phrase isn't there.

If that difference is clear to you, you've understood the most important part of the lesson.

allintitle with other operators

allintitle: takes every word after it. That's why it doesn't work well if you add other operators like site: to it.

The safer way: use intitle before each word. Same meaning, and no confusion:

An SEO example: your competitors' content angles

You're going to write a page about the manual grinder. You want to know what angle people write about it from: a comparison? A review? A buying guide?

Every result here is a page whose title makes clear it was built for one particular angle. Collect them, and you'll know which angles already exist, and what's missing that your page could cover.

A competitor's title template

In the last lesson we found that eBay's pages all end their titles with "for sale | eBay". You can bring up every page with the same template:

Pages that mention the phrase without targeting it

This is one of the most useful ones. Excluding the title with the minus sign:

Read it as: pages from this site with "coffee grinder" in the text, but no "grinder" in the title.

If that site were yours, these are pages that talk about the topic without being built for it. And that's exactly where you put an internal link to your main grinder page.

allintitle and judging competition

Lots of people in SEO use the number of allintitle: results as a signal: how many pages put this phrase in their title? If the number is small, the competition for that phrase might be lower.

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

The practical test

A thinking test

You want to know how many pages were built specifically for the phrase "manual coffee grinder". Which query is more accurate?

• "manual coffee grinder"
• intitle:"manual coffee grinder"

The first brings up any page that mentions the phrase, even in one line at the end of an article.

The second brings up the pages that put the phrase in their title. Those are usually the pages built for it.

And again: ask yourself the question first. "Where is the phrase?" is one question. "Was the page built for the phrase?" is another.

Before the next lesson

• intitle:word this word only, in the title.
• intitle:"a whole phrase" the exact phrase in the title.
• allintitle:word word every word after it in the title, in any order, and on its own with no other operators.
• -intitle:word the title doesn't have the word.

The title isn't the only place. The link says a lot about a page too: is it a product? A category? An article? In the next lesson we'll use inurl: to bring up one kind of page from the shape of its link, and intext: to search a page's text.