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Using Google commands to find link building opportunities

May 14, 2012   Google Commands

Google commands for link building

How can you used Google commands in your everyday searching? It’s well know that Google puts a lot of emphasis on how many and what quality back links you have coming into your website when determining how much authority your site has and ultimately how relevant your site is for keyword searches.

Put simply – more quality links = more relevance = more traffic = more leads = more sales!

Getting more quality links to your website is a challenge and there are numerous ways to achieve, but in this article I’m going to look at some very simple Google Operators, or Google commands that you can use to find those link partners.

 Using Google Search Operators to build links from blogs

Let’s say you want to look for blogs that are in your niche market and that you think would be useful to get a link from.

For this example, let’s assume that your site sells flowers and you want to find blogs about flowers. Enter the command below into the Google search query bar:

site:.com inurl:”blog” “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” “flowers”

This search does the following:

  1. site:.com inurl:blog – this finds sites are .com and have the keyword ‘blog’ as part of their URL, e.g. www.mydomain.com/blog
  2. “post a comment” – this finds sites that allow comments
  3. ”comments closed” -”you must be logged in” – this narrows the search down to those sites that allow comments and do not require that you register
  4.  “flowers” – finally the keyword that you’re looking to find in the blog, this helps Google return only those blogs that are relevant for your niche
So, if you enter the command above in Google.com you receive 222k results – a lot less that if you started with only the search ‘flower blogs’, 229 million!!

Using Google commands to find niche target pages

What if you want to uncover link opportunities from traditional sites. What Google commands would you use in this case?

If you want to find sites in your niche, you can target your research in a couple of ways,

  1. Find sites that have your target keyword in the title tag of the page – intitle:”flowers new york” – this will find pages with the keyword phrase, ‘flowers new york’ in the title.
  2. Let’s say you’re interested in sites that put a lot of emphasis on certain keywords, so much so that they have them as part of their internal links strategy. Again, using the ‘flowers new youk’ example, you would use the Google commands as follows, inanchor:’flowers new york’
What Google commands have you used to used to uncover link building opportunities?
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Peter Cullen

Lover of all things Marketing Online - Search - SEO, PPC, Social, Email, Affiliate, Mobile & Display!