Special site: operator search for indexed pages

[gouri]

I was reading a thread on webmasterworld that says that you should check a website in the Google SERP in the following ways:

site:example.com
site:example.com -inurl:www

I tried to find that thread but couldn't so I am posting this here (I think that this is something general that could be in this thread).

Can someone please tell me what this helps you to determine or check?

Thanks.

[edited by: tedster at 8:50 pm (utc) on Aug 22, 2012]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[tedster]

The first search should give you the total number of URLs indexed. The second should give you just the total number of no-www URLs.

If the first number is a lot higher than the second (and if the content with and without a "www" is identical), then you've potentially got a canonical problem to resolve. The two numbers should be in the same general range, but don't expect total precision - just numbers that are in the same ballpark.

Here's a reference that can help you construct your own advanced searches using various operators: [googleguide.com...]

[gouri]

@tedster,

When I perform a site:example.com search, I am seeing the urls of the website in the index.

When I perform a site:example.com -inurl:www search, I am seeing no results.

The urls on the site have been redirected (e.g. example.com to www.example.com)

Am I seeing what I am supposed to see?

[g1smd]

Are you sure that you didn't mean

[site:www.example.com]

[site:example.com -inurl:www]

instead?
The first search lists www pages.
The second search lists all except www.

[gouri]

When I performed a site:www.example.com search, I saw the urls of the site in the index.

When I performed a site:example.com -inurl:www search, I didn't see urls in the index.

Should it be this way?

[lucy24]

If your preferred form is with www, and you've told google so, and all requests are properly redirected, there should be NO results for the "without www" version. Conversely if your preferred form is without, et cetera, there should be NO results for the "with www" version. I checked this recently with my own site.

[gouri]

Thanks for the explanation.

I believe that my requests are redirected from example.com to www.example.com so I think that when I perform a site:example.com -inurl:www search, I should see no results in the SERP and when I perform a

site:example.com inurl:www search, I should see the site's urls in the index?

Do I have this right?

[mslina2002]

Do I have this right?

Yes, you have that right.

Also assuming you have NO subdomains e.g. shop.example.com, blog.example.com, then you won't see any urls.

[gouri]

I wanted to say thanks to everyone for their help with this.

Also @mslina2002, thanks for mentioning the subdomains. That is something that I had not thought about before reading your post.

[phranque]

if you have a dedicated IP address you might want to check that in a site: search and if your host provides a temporary hostname or subdirectory for your site such as sitename.hostname.com or hostname.com/~sitename you should check for those as well.

finally you should check for possible alias domains (and scrapers) by searching for a few unique terms or phrases in quotes.