Google inurl and intext Search Operators Explained

In the last lesson we searched the title. Today we have two more places: the page's link, and its text.

We'll start with the link, because it tells you something about the page the title doesn't: what kind of page it is.

The link tells you the kind of page

Open any product on Amazon and look at the link. You'll find /dp/ in it, followed by the product's code.

Open a category, and you'll find /b?node=. The best sellers list has /gp/bestsellers/. And a search results page inside Amazon has /s?k=.

So if you want product pages only, you don't need to know their names. You need to know the shape of their link.

inurl: a word that has to be in the link

Read it as: from Amazon, the pages whose link has dp in it, and that have the word grinder.

The search results page "electric coffee grinder" is gone, even though the word is in its title. Because it isn't a product page. And that's exactly what we wanted.

And the reverse: everything except products

The minus sign works here too:

What's left is the categories, the best sellers and the search pages. And those are the pages that show you how Amazon organizes its products, and which categories it built pages for.

A word in the link

Amazon's links have part of the product's name in them. So you can search for a word in the link:

Look at the wooden grinder. It's a manual grinder, and the word "Manual" is in its title. But not in its link.

Why?

Because Amazon only takes part of the name for the link, and the seller chooses which part. Its link says "Coffee-Mill-Grinder-Adjustable-Setting".

The lesson here: inurl: is useful when the link has a fixed shape, like dp. But the words in a link don't always describe everything on the page.

allinurl: every word in the link

Exactly like allintitle:. allinurl: applies to every word after it:

Read it as: the link has shop and coffee and grinder. Those are the eBay landing pages we saw in the site lesson.

And the same warning: allinurl: doesn't work well with other operators. If you need site: with it, use inurl: before each word.

Watch out for short words

Product pages on Walmart have /ip/ in their link. But inurl:ip isn't a good idea. Two letters like ip can turn up in lots of links that have nothing to do with it. The more distinctive the word, the more accurate the results.

intext: a word that has to be in the page's text

Now the second place: the text.

A normal search looks in the title, the text and the link together. intext: looks in the page's text only.

The Target page "manual coffee grinder" is gone. The phrase is in its title, but not in the text we have from it.

Honestly? intext: on its own rarely differs from a normal search, because most pages with a phrase in their title have the same phrase in their text. Its real value is when you combine it with other operators.

The most common use: the phrase in the text, but not in the title

These pages talk about the manual grinder in their text, but weren't built for it. That could be a link opportunity: the author mentioned the product, and might add a link to a page that explains it.

And an example with no competitors: has your content been copied?

Take a distinctive sentence from your page, one nobody would write by chance, and search for it outside your site:

Any result here is a page with the same sentence on another site. Either it copied you, or you both copied the same source. Either way, you need to know.

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

The practical test

A thinking test

Your competitor has a blog, and you want to know how many articles they wrote about coffee.

Do you type site:competitor.com inurl:blog coffee? Or site:competitor.com/blog coffee?

Both might work. But the second is more accurate: it says "the link starts with /blog". The first says "the word blog anywhere in the link", and that could bring up a page like /products/blog-stand.

When you know how the link starts, use site. When you know a word that repeats inside the link, use inurl.

Before the next lesson

• inurl:dp the link has this word.
• -inurl:dp the link doesn't have this word.
• allinurl:word word every word in the link, and on its own.
• intext:"phrase" the phrase in the page's text.

Everything we've found so far has been web pages. But there's another kind of content that matters a lot to anyone who writes content: reports and statistics, which are usually PDF or Excel files. In the next lesson we'll learn to reach them with the filetype: operator.