Google Footprints: Learn to Make the Most of Them

More than once you may have wanted to know some data related to your website's ranking and found that to know it you had to pay for the use of a tool. Although there are cases where you have no choice but to open your wallet, in many others there are free solutions, such as Google footprints.

Don't know them yet? Well, keep reading, as we are going to reveal them to you and they will surely change many of your browsing and research habits.

What are Google footprints and what are they for?

Footprints are advanced search operators offered by Google (also Bing, although less) that allow us to obtain very interesting results at no cost. They are a series of commands that, when applied to your website's domain or those of your competitors, can show you everything from the number of pages indexed to related sites, or those containing a specific word in the URL or even in the text.

There are many possibilities that Google footprints offer, especially since some can be combined with each other to filter results, narrow down by countries, etc. This way you can customize your searches to unexpected limits.

SEO experts and digital marketing enthusiasts have implemented these instructions into their regular routines, especially in tasks focused on link building. I can see you eager to get to work, right?

What are the main footprints and how to use them

Here’s a list of the most common commands. From there, play with them as much as you want, combine them, and customize your own. Some combinations may not work for you, but it's a matter of trying.

Although it may sometimes seem indifferent, respect whether each one has a space after the colon or not, otherwise the searches will not work correctly. What does not affect at all is whether you include the "www" or the obvious ones when entering the web address. The .es, .com, or extension of your domain must always be included:

• site:youraddress.com | Shows you the pages indexed in Google for the domain you enter. It also works in Google Images.
• cache:youraddress.com | Displays the screenshot of that website in the latest cached version, usually from a few days ago.
• related:youraddress.com | Returns pages that are similar or related to the domain in question.
• allinanchor:word | Gives you sites that contain "word" in the anchor text of a link.
• inanchor:words | Shows websites that have those words in the text of a link.

• allintext:word | Pages that have that word in the text.
• intext:words | Sites that have the words we choose in their text.
• allintitle:word | Websites that have that word in the title.
• intitle:words | Pages that have the words we specify in the title.
• allinurl:word | Sites that have that word in their domain.
• inurl:words | Websites that have the words we have entered in their URL.
• author:name | Searches for pages with articles signed by that specific name.
• filetype:pdf | Selects files with the extension you specify, in this case, PDF.

There are others, but these are the most common. Keep in mind that, as we mentioned, you can use more than one at a time to further narrow down your searches.

For example, you may want to see which websites are linking to yours, but without including your own pages in the results. For that, you would enter: link:youraddress.com -site:youraddress.com.

The official list of refined searches from Google

Google removes and adds some footprints over time. For example, in November 2016, movie: stopped working (it showed movie results), but others like weather: (lists weather news for the location you enter) or source: (in Google News to filter by a specific media outlet) are still active.

In reality, most of these footprints are "unofficial," as the list of those included by Google in what it calls "refined searches", aside from the filters of its own tool, is quite limited. Some of them are:

• @domain for searching results on social networks
• $number for searching prices
• #hashtag for trends on social media
• " " for exact searches
• * as a wildcard, for example "the most * site in the world"

SEO tricks with footprints

Now you will see why footprints are so popular among those who work in SEO. Imagine you have an online store that sells lipsticks. In that case, you might be interested in knowing what blogs in Spain talk about lips, right? Well, to find out, you just need to chain footprints.

We would enter inurl:blog "lips". This narrows the search so that the results are domains that include the word blog and the exact term "lips".

We could go further by adding site:.es, and it would return only Spanish-speaking blogs. Although if you do the search from google.es, the .com ones are also included, but anyway. This serves as an example of the possibilities it offers.

All this we have seen so far is information, but let's get to the practical. If you want to get links to your pages, one way to achieve this is by leaving comments on other websites.

And what if Google also told you which of those blogs you found earlier allow you to leave a comment? It's as easy as asking for it. Add to the previous footprint "post a comment" or "leave a comment", phrases that usually appear on those blogs that allow them. And voilà:

But maybe you're a bit lazy, and if they ask you to register, you're not interested anymore. Well, let's add another filter to filter out those that do not require registration. Usually, you will find the phrase "You must be logged in" in the blogs that do require it.

We continue extending the footprint, which would now look like this: inurl:blog “post a comment” “lips” -“you must be logged in”. With the minus symbol, we are telling it not to show us those lip blogs that require registration to comment.

And we could keep refining until we wanted or Google allowed us...

If you find it too complicated to create your own footprints, here is RastroSEO, a tool created by Chuiso that automates searches based on the most useful commands to find the ideal sites to make backlinks.

However, you would then have to evaluate which of those sites, based on their authority and relevance, it is worth leaving a link. But we will see that in another article!

Did you already know about Google footprints? Is there any particularly useful one that we missed? Will you share it with us?