In this article, a complexity effective and robust cell search method is proposed for machine-type communication in a long-term evolution system. The correlation between the primary synchronization signal (PSS) and secondary synchronization signal (SSS) in the frequency domain is exploited to remove the effect of channel fading distortion and symbol timing offset. This design facilitates robust synchronization of the carrier frequency offset, sector ID, and duplex mode without performing hypothesis testing on SSS candidates, followed by the detection of group ID. Both theoretical and experimental results are presented to justify the effectiveness of the proposed cell search scheme. The simulation results show that the proposed method achieves robust and reduced-complexity cell search when there are nonnegligible residual symbol timing error and frequency-selective fading distortion, compared to existing methods.