There’s an operator in Google that’s been around for years that nobody ever really discusses. In fact, I just learned of it recently. It’s called the AROUND operator and is useful for finding relationships between two phrases. In the SEO world, few things are better related than Matt Cutts and “penalty”. Using the AROUND operator brings up a great set of results where Matt is mentioned within a certain number of words of “penalty”. Check out the results here. Though it’s fun to mess around with Matt, a better example of AROUND’s use is to find how someone is related to a topic. It’s easy to find a lot of literature about how Henry Ford is related to the assembly line using this operator. Here are the results.
This isn’t the first time I’ve posted about Google operators. For a larger list check this page. I’m not sure if they all still work or not. If you find one that doesn’t, let me know!
