Using the inurl: tool for search optimization

It’s not often anymore that I learn about a new, simple tool to use in search engine optimization. After 10 years of SEO experience, I tend to think that I know most of the tricks, but I’m always excited when some article or conversation brings to light a completely new technique or tool that I can use.

In a ClickZ article published today by Erik Dafforn (http://www.clickz.com/3630292), the author discussed the use of the site: technique to determine how many pages from a website are indexed by major search engines (this works in Google, Yahoo, and MSN).

You just need to type site:www.jmhconsulting.com and the results will tell you how many pages the search engine “knows about” from your website. I’ve used this technique for years to determine whether a new website has yet been indexed by a search engine or whether a search engine’s crawler is “seeing” all of the pages within a website.

A new technique for me, however, was the use of the inurl: syntax to search for pages that contains a certain piece of your url. For example -> inurl:jmhconsulting.com would return any pages that contain the string “jmhconsulting.com” in their URL. This helps identify pages in your website that google had found WITH or WITHOUT the www prefix. A handy tool when you’re trying to get a full picture of your indexed. site.