Searching what Google knows about your site

October 12, 2005

So, you've submitted your Sitemap. How can you tell what Google knows about your site?

You can use Google's advanced search features to get a list of:

  • search results from your site
  • pages that link to your site
  • pages that refer to your site's URL

You can also see information that we have about your site.

You can do many of these advanced searches (amazingly enough) by clicking the Advanced Search link on www.google.com. You can also use our advanced search operators in your query. If you are using operators, remember that there should not be a space between the operator and the URL. Note that we use brackets to indicate the words in the search box. The query itself should not include the brackets.

Results from your site (site: operator)

To find pages from your site, use the site: operator. For instance, site:www.google.com. You can also type the URL in the Domain field of the Advanced Search page.

domain field on the advanced search page

You can also use this feature to search through any site. Simply enter the search query followed by the site: operator and the site you want to search through. For instance, to search for admission information on the Stanford University web site, type admission site:www.stanford.edu. And, you can use this feature to search through sites from specific top-level domains. For instance, to search for information about Zürich on Swiss sites in the .ch domain, type Zürich site:.ch.

To find pages that link to your site, use the link: operator. For instance, link:www.google.com. You can also type the URL in the Links field of the Advanced Search page.

links field on the advanced search page

Pages that refer to your site's URL (allinurl: operator)

To find pages that include your site's URL, use the allinurl: operator. For instance, allinurl:www.google.com.

Information Google has about your site (info: operator)

To see information that Google knows about your site, use the info: operator. For instance, info:www.google.com. That query results in the following:

result for an info: query

Some questions you may have about these results...

I submitted my Sitemap but I don't see all the pages listed. When will they be indexed?

We can't guarantee if or when we'll index pages we receive from Sitemaps submissions. We use Sitemaps as another view into your site to augment our regular crawling methods. Also, we don't want the Googlebot to overwhelm your bandwidth, so we may not crawl it all at one time.

Some of my results are labeled "Supplemental". What does that mean?

That means that pages are part of our auxiliary index. You can read more about that in our webmaster guidelines.