How to Search Within a Website on Google with site:

In the last lesson we learned to control the words on the page: an exact phrase with quotes, excluding with the minus sign, and alternatives with OR.

But there's another question that matters a lot in SEO:

Not "what's on the page?", but "which site is this page on?"

Say your biggest competitor for grinders is Amazon. And you want to see what Amazon has on the manual grinder.

If you do a normal search, Amazon shows up in the middle of dozens of other sites.

You need to tell Google: search inside Amazon only.

That's the job of the site: operator.

The first operator with a colon: site

Read it as: "from amazon.com only, the pages that have coffee grinder".

eBay, Target and the Coffeeness guide are gone. Only Amazon is left.

And the Spanish Amazon page is gone too, because none of the English words we typed are on it.

Notice that Amazon's electric grinder showed up. That's because site: only sets the site, and the words work as usual: anywhere.

And if you want to drop it? You know that from the last lesson: -electric.

No space after the colon

Here there's a space after site:. Google won't read it as an operator; it'll treat "site" as a normal word to look for.

This rule holds for every operator with a colon: the operator sticks to what comes after it. site:amazon.com, not site: amazon.com.

site with no words at all

You can type the operator on its own:

Now you're asking Google: show me whatever pages you have from this site.

And that's the first thing anyone doing SEO does when they pick up a new site: type site: and the site's domain, and see whether Google knows any of its pages, and what those pages look like.

site with part of a site

Amazon in the US has two editions: English and Spanish.

Open the Spanish edition and you'll find all its links start with amazon.com/-/es/.

And site: doesn't only take a domain. You can give it the start of a link:

Read it as: "any page whose link starts with amazon.com/-/es".

The English pages are all gone. And look at the Spanish category: its link still says Manual-Coffee-Grinders, in English, but it starts with /-/es, so it's in.

This is really useful when a site is split into sections: a blog under /blog/, products under /products/, and languages under /en/ and /es/.

Another example: De'Longhi UK and De'Longhi US

De'Longhi runs several countries on the same domain. The UK is under /en-gb/ and the US under /en-us/.

If you type site:delonghi.com grinder you get both countries together. But you're working on the UK market:

site and subdomains

When you type site:amazon.com, Google brings up pages from www.amazon.com and any other subdomain under amazon.com.

And if you type one specific subdomain, like site:www.amazon.com, the results come from that one only.

The same idea works on the end of a domain. site:gov.uk means: any UK government site, because they all end in gov.uk.

We'll need that a lot in the lesson on files and reports.

Excluding a whole site

Now the reverse.

You want to know who writes about the manual grinder other than the big stores. Smaller competitors, blogs and specialist shops.

The minus sign we learned works with site: too:

Amazon is gone, and every other site with the phrase stayed.

And you can exclude more than one site in the same query:

Several sites together

And the reverse: you want to compare just three stores, in one search. Here we go back to OR and brackets:

Notice that we put the operators at the start of the search and the words after them. Google doesn't need that; the order doesn't matter to it. But it makes the query easier to read.

An SEO example: how does eBay get its traffic?

Look at the links of the eBay pages we've seen so far: they all have /shop/ in them.

Let's see what else is under that part:

"Coffee Grinder", "Wooden Manual Coffee Grinder", "Coffee Grinder 500w"...

Each one of them is built for one particular search phrase. And they all use the same title template: the phrase, then "for sale | eBay".

So eBay builds a landing page for every way people search.

That's what site: with the start of a link does: it shows you how your competitor builds their site, without any paid tool.

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

The practical test

A thinking test

You typed site:yoursite.com and Google says "about 300 results", and you know the site has 1,200 pages.

Does that mean 900 pages aren't indexed?

Not necessarily. Google itself says the number is an estimate, and that the operator doesn't show every page. That number is a signal to open Search Console and check, not a final verdict.

And the signal really worth stopping for: when you find pages in the site: results that shouldn't be there. Test pages, internal search results, or duplicate pages. Those are things that open up work.

Before the next lesson

• site:amazon.com results from this site only, with its subdomains.
• site:amazon.com/-/es results from this section only.
• -site:amazon.com every site except this one.
• (site:amazon.com OR site:ebay.com) several sites together.

So far the words show up anywhere on the page. But in SEO there's one place that matters more than any other: the page title. In the next lesson we'll learn to search the title only, and the difference between intitle: and allintitle:.