Blocking Sites From Search Results

Hi. I’m Andy Williams. Today I’m going to be looking at one of the most important changes over the last year that I think is worth looking at, and that’s blocking sites in your own personal search. Basically, what Google has done now is that if you are logged into your Google account, you now have the option to actually block any domains that you don’t feel are relevant. So if you carry out a search for “cars” and you find that one of the domains isn’t truly relevant, isn’t giving you the information that you feel is relevant to what you were looking for, you now have the option to actually block that entire domain.

So what you’ll find is that if you go to a page, you don’t feel it’s relevant, and then you click the Back button and go back to your Google search, you have the option to actually block the domain from all your results. If you click on this, what you’ll find is that that domain will now no longer appear in any searches that you carry
out for any results that you look for. So the next time you look for “cars,” that domain won’t appear. The next time you look for “restaurants”, although probably not as relevant, the domain still wouldn’t appear.

So have you gotten rid of that domain completely? Well, no, because it is a personal search. So you do have the option to unblock it, but it hasn’t disappeared from Google itself so you don’t have that kind of power.

Why would you carry out such an action? Well, you might find that the results that are returned back to you are low quality. If they are not truly relevant, they are not quality sites, you don’t want to see them again. You might just want to tidy up your results. You might just want to make it more personal so that the results that you find are going to be more personal to you, and you just want to get rid of the stuff that you know you’re never going to look at. Of course, anything that’s non-relevant but suddenly appears, you can get rid of.

So, like I say, this isn’t something that is going to disappear from Google completely, and you can unblock them at any time. Of course, the big question is, is Google going to actually use any of this data in the future. At the moment, Google says it is not, but they have been quite open and have said that if this data does become relevant, it might become a ranking factor. So we’ll look out for that, probably in the next year or so.

Hopefully, that little snippet has been of help. I’ve been Andy Williams. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can also like us on our Facebook, and of course, there is also our blog to check out.