Google Hacks for Dorks and SEO prowlers

Google Hacks… or more aptly Google Dorks are a handy tool for anyone that not only enjoys SEO, but searching in general. Originally termed as such by the hacker/cracker community – you can get lot’s of interesting information. They call ‘em dorks because if you’re leaving information open to the search engines that shouldn’t be… then yer a dork!

And I figure if Google is allowed to read certain files and feels like serving related data back to me…then great! There should be no reason for me not to play with them and entertain you, titillate and hopefully even educate. Oh, and yea… we’ll get to some SEO stuff too…but later.
Google Advanced Operators

As any good search geek knows, the advanced operators are a great way to mine for a variety of data. You know the ones, site: link: intitle: and the rest of the family. But let’s look at how they got that name of ‘dorks’ just to get the idea… of some dorky info floating around at Google.

Let’s have some fun with a few shall we? First let’s go looking for some sensitive data via Robots.txt. Now I am not going to show you any dirty laundry you cheeky monkey, but if one spent enough time (and there are those that do) often sensitive info is thought to be invisible by webmasters with this little command; the Disallow

"robots.txt" "Disallow:" filetype:txt

or even…

"robots.txt" "Disallow:" "private" filetype:txt

Which can always be fun for an evenings reading…. Obviously you can play with keywords and get inventive. But that’s not really a dork since robots files are publicly available… ok so let’s move along…


Getting Sensitive

"not for public release" –
This is an oldie but a goodie and one can certainly play with it as well by looking closer at some .edu - .gov or .mil TLDs as well. For example;

"not for public release" inurl:edu

Or how about;

"not for distribution" confidential filetype:pdf

This will tighten it up to only showing PDFs which I find to be ever so much more helpful. And let’s say for fun we’re in the travel sector looking for some good tidbits for link bait of other general business intelligence we add our KW too the mix;

"not for distribution" confidential, travel, filetype:pdf

You get the idea here…. all I can say is that one can start to apply the concepts behind these hacks to find all kinds of interesting reading material. And if you’re a reporter…well, I am sure your nose is tingling at the moment.



Robots.txt (aka business intelligence)

Let’s say we’re working the ‘florida’ market and wanted to see what other sites in the space are up to we could use;

"robots.txt" "Disallow:" filetype:txt …or even better - (inurl:"robot.txt" | inurl:"robots.txt" ) intext:disallow filetype:txt and "robots.txt" "Disallow:" filetype:txt inurl:florida

What any of that information is.. or how it can be used, I leave to your imagination – I’m just sayin’…



AW Stats (aka Keyword Research)

Sticking with our Florida theme, now go looking for some stats from .edu domains with ‘florida’ related…
florida intitle:"statistics of" "advanced web statistics"

Maybe we’re only interested in some .edu domains?
florida intitle:"statistics of" "advanced web statistics" inurl:.edu

Or maybe we want to see what keyphrases are being used to find .edu sites;
keyphrases intitle:"statistics of" "advanced web statistics" inurl:.edu

Webalizer; and of course we can also do the same with Webalizer (or other popular program)
intitle:"Usage Statistics for" "Generated by Webalizer"

and the ‘florida’ niche with these
intitle:"Usage Statistics for" "Generated by Webalizer" inurl:florida

or….

florida intitle:"Usage Statistics for" "Generated by Webalizer"

You could even search images - inurl:/webalizer/ intitle:usage statistics + hosting

You get the idea… play with it to find more goodies. If these dorks want to leave me research data to mine for KWs and so forth…what am I to do? I merely asked Google questions and went for a random walk.


And what can you use it for?

I say there is no end to the information both educational and entertaining out there thanks to the dorks and Google. Some of the more interesting uses I have found are;

* KW research
* Link Building
* Content creation
* Competitive intelligence
* Nefarious things (for you A types)

And I am being tame with the examples… so one wonders, are we dorks?

During the research and many hours playing around I have found the deeper darker side and what I have posted here merely scratches the surface as far as nefarious ways to use them. Giving pause, the consideration of ranting about Google’s (and other search engines) enabling of this misses the fact we are dorks. Through laziness or lack of foresight we often leave things in public as much as leaving our open laptop unaccompanied in the park in summer. Don’t be a dork

I like to use them to find things like lists of directories and other reports to see what others are up to; directory filetype:xls inurl:SEO OR report filetype:xls inurl:SEO - that time looking for XLS files…

Link Builders dream…

Maybe you’re a happy little link builder that is looking for some nice spots to drop your legitimate/spammy links. Let’s try this;

add-links, last-updated 2000 inurl:.edu

Using advanced search operators such as we did with the Yahoo Site Explorer is another great way to track down opportunities for the fastidious link builder. First off let’s use the ‘linkdomain’ operator

linkdomain:huomah.com site:.com "SEO Blog"

1. linkdomain: – searches for links to Huomah.com
2. Site; - tells it to look for results from ‘.com’ extensions.
3. “SEO Blog” searches the KWs on the page (or hopefully in the anchor text)



That’s the basics to give you the idea… now we’ll step it up some.

We’re looking for target pages where there is a link to the site (my blog again) and has the target term we’re after. This is by no means full-proof and does require some leg work, but it will make the targeting of relevant themes in your linking somewhat easier.

We can also do the same for .edu or .gov websites, which are perceived to be more valuable as trusted sources of search engines – we’d do so as such;

1. linkdomain:example.com site:.edu "keyword"
2. linkdomain:example.com site:.gov " keyword"

…. Play with them… always some goodies to be found. We’re getting warmer….

Now let’s look at another route, which is to look at the linking sites and associated page titles. Considering the theme of the page is important to the value of the link, pages with related keywords in the page title are of interest to us. So for the keyword SEO (researching my blog as a competitor) I could do something like this;

linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com intitle:SEO

And when we have multiple terms such as; ‘search engine optimization’ we would use quotations;

linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com intitle:"search engine optimization"

Once more, we can also use Inurl: which looks for the keyword(s) in the url from linking pages; another reasonably strong ranking signal.

linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com inurl:"search engine optimization"

I advise playing around to find other angles which these can be used. This is a great method ( allintitle: and allinurl: for Google - whose link data sucks)
Don’t be a Dork

There are as many ways to utilize them as the imagination will allow. Advanced search operators are one of the greatest tools for the SEO practitioner; and hackers alike. Understanding not only how to use them, but how to protect against them (from a hackers viewpoint) is huge. If you want to learn more there is some further reading below;

Google HACKS – more reading

the Google Hacking DataBase - I Hack Stuff
Google Hacking Not Fun For You - WebPro News
Advanced operators reference guide – Google Guide
Advanced search operators – Van SEO Design
The ultimate guide to advanced operators - Hybrid SEM