Google rolls out domain blocking in search results

By on Mar 10, 2011 at 11:35 PM
Services March 10, 2011

Google on Thursday announced the availability of a new feature that allows users to block specific domains from appearing in their search results. Google has taken several measures lately in an effort to improve the quality of its search results, which can often become devalued by “content farms” and other sites that make it their business to game Google by churning out low-quality search friendly content. Beyond changes that Google has made to its algorithms, users can now take it upon themselves to weed out the junk that Google misses. When users click on a search result and then return to Google, they will now see an option to block domain that was clicked. The result is a customized search experience that will continue to improve over time as users block more domains. Google is currently in the process of rolling out the new feature, which should be available to all users soon.

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  • http://twitter.com/singersteve Steven C. Wilson

    thank god I can finally block effing experts exchange.

    • http://twitter.com/danyay Dan

      just scroll down to the very bottom of the page, the text is there.

    • Anonymous

      Agreed

  • http://www.facebook.com/peterf Peter Fares

    YES! I hate it when I’m searching for something and there are these annoying sites which spam search keywords, making their useless page near the top all the time.

  • http://www.absolutefiction.com Jed Tylman

    Now that’s a useful feature!
    Content is king once again and spammers will be left scrambling for ways to walk around this feature, I’m sure.

  • George W.

    google is bi-winning!! again!

  • Anonymous

    It’s a great idea, but I can see this being abused. Since Google will use some of this data to determine search results, a nefarious person or group could start hijacking search results by blocking legitimate sites. As that block data is reported back to Google, it could affect the outcome of search results.

    • Rara

      no. it only blocks sites for YOU on that computer/ip; not in general

      • Anonymous

        From the Google blog post, it’s the next step.
        “In addition, while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future.”

  • Chut Pata

    Good. If we can block junk mail, we should be able to block junk websites in our search.

    However I am not sure if they would an option to block just a page or an entire domain e.g. in some cases I would not want a blog site to be banned, just one blogger who has put on his blog all the keywords in dictionary. It is just like sometimes I want to block email from a sender, sometimes from the entire domain.

  • Anonymous

    Does it work on the News aggregator? Because I’m tired of Fox propaganda all over the place.

    • Chut Pata

      Good question. We should be able to filter out sites based on certain keywords, just like we can set an email rule that says if the email contains the word viagra, throw it in junk mail :)

  • http://twitter.com/SEOTrainingWiz SEO Training Wizard

    brilliant! a perfect service to “customize” the internet.

  • http://twitter.com/soulfly4400 Striker

    Mabie this will kill those content farms alot quicker than other methods. I know I will be blocking as many as I see, and hope others do likewise. We’ll take down their add revenue, and drive them off the web. Oh, wait, i’m too much of an idealest. Even so, I’d love to see what they do when they stop making the kind of cash off spam they’ve grown to expect.

  • Biz Worker

    Great feature. Ripoffreport, pissed consumer, and other garbage sites are gone with the wind.

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