How to Exclude Specific Domains in Google Search Results
You’re not alone if you’ve ever used Google to search for something and discovered that the results were clogged with irrelevant or useless links from a specific website or domain.
Sifting through pages of search results only to discover that the same useless website is coming up repeatedly can be aggravating. But don’t worry! This issue can be easily fixed by eliminating particular domains from your Google search results.
While Google’s search engine is sophisticated, there might be situations where you’d want to exclude specific domains from your search results.
For example, if you’re looking for academic research, you might want to exclude domains like social media platforms or news websites. This helps you find more credible and relevant sources.
In this post, we’ll look at how to use this practical tool to simplify your searches and exclude specific domains from the search results.
Exclude Domains in Google Search Results
Step 1: Start Your Search
To get started, open up Google in your web browser and type in your search query as you normally would. For example, let’s say you’re searching for information on the best hiking trails in your area.
Step 2: Exclude Domains
Now, let’s say that you’ve found that the website “example.com” consistently appears in your search results and you want to exclude all pages from that domain. You can do this by adding the following to the end of your search query:
-site:example.com
So, your search query would look something like this:
“best hiking trails” -site:example.com
This will exclude all pages from the “example.com” domain from your search results.
Step 3: Review Your Results
Once you’ve excluded the domain, Google will return search results that don’t include any pages from that site. You can then review your search results to see if they’re more relevant to your query.
If you find that another domain is still appearing in your search results and you want to exclude that domain as well, simply add “-site:domain.com” to your search query, with “domain.com” being the name of the domain you want to exclude.
Step 4: Refine Your Search
If you find that your search results are too cluttered or you’re still seeing pages from a particular website or domain, you may need to refine your search query further. Try using more specific keywords or phrases related to your search, or use additional filters or search operators to narrow your results even further.
How to Include Search Results in Google
The process of adding and rejecting pages or websites from your search engine is the same. In both circumstances, you are presented with three distinct alternatives, each with its own distinct behaviour.
- Select the search engine you want to update from the control panel.
- From the left-hand menu, choose Setup.
- Click Add under the Basics tab, under Sites to search.
- Enter the URL you want to include and choose whether to include all pages that match or just that page. If you’re unsure which one to choose, see the table below.
- Click the Save button.
Any page containing the URL is either included or excluded. Entering www.mysite.com, for example, will match www.mysite.com/about.html but not blog.mysite.com.
If you input a particular page address, for example, www.mysite.com/about.html, it will return just that page. Additionally, you may use URL patterns such as www.mysite.com/*about.
It’s important to remember that excluding domains is a temporary solution and won’t affect future searches unless you use browser extensions or settings specifically designed for this purpose.