If you want to drill down into the more technical aspects of SEO, you will quickly become familiar with the site: operator function; it truly is one of the simplest and most powerful tools available to a modern SEO professional.
The most basic use of the tool enables pairing it with a root or sub domain; when executed, the function will estimate the number of indexed pages attached to the domain. It also returns an actual list of the pages in that given index. However, what if your site is too big to easily make use of this?
The answer comes in the form of other query operators. Many different search options can be paired with site: to return a variety of different information, depending on what you are looking for.
If you are trying to spot crawl problems with your site for example, consider appending a subfolder to the query (such as /blog); by following the basic infrastructure of the site map, you should easily be able to verify the complete structure of a site in this manner, easily identifying any issues with indexing or crawling.
Other query modifications work on the site search operator as well; don’t forget to use all the tools available to you for technical SEO.
