Even though I use Google to search the web, it is still far from ideal. They change their algorithms almost every day, and not always every change for the better. Add to that all the personalization and geographic search results, and you get a different set of results, even if you sometimes search for the same thing twice.
For someone like me, there are times when I just don’t want to see a certain website in the search results. For example, before buying anything online, I always check the Amazon site as I am a primary contributor. This means that when I do a Google search, I don’t care about the Amazon result showing up, which can sometimes span multiple places. I also don’t want to manually exclude the site every time I search.
So is there a way to permanently block a site from Google search results? Fortunately, yes, but it requires an extension to be installed. In this article, I will show you how to permanently block certain websites from Google search results.
Personal site blocking list
You can create a personal website blacklist in Google Chrome by installing the extension below, which was previously used by Google.
Personal blacklist (not from Google)
After you install it in Chrome and do a Google search, you will see an option to block this site right below the title and URL for search results.
When you click on a blocking link, the result disappears from the search results immediately. One of the great features of the extension is that it will tell you at the bottom of the page if any results have been blocked. I find this useful in some cases where I want to see which sites have been blocked for that particular request. When you block a site, not only will it not appear in the results for that request, but it will not appear in the results at all for any request. So be careful when blocking sites because they will never appear again.
If you click the Show button, the result reappears in the original position it was in and is highlighted in light pink. If you want, you can unblock the site at this stage.
If you want to see a list of all blocked sites, just click on the weird blacklist icon in the toolbar. It looks to me like a strange orange color with a hand icon. I have no idea why they chose this, but okay.
It is also possible to block the host for the current tab. I am on Google.com above, so it displays “Block current host: google.comâ€. So if you have a tab open and want to block this site from not finding it in search results, just click the button and block it.
In addition to this extension, Google also has a Webspam Report plugin that will allow you to report sites as spam. I also installed this because I also get spam results quite often and it is better to report the site as spam and block it at the same time, rather than just block it. Thus, if enough people report a site as spam, it will end up far below the search results.
By using these two extensions in Chrome, you can actually improve the results to your liking. It takes time and patience, but it’s worth it if you do hundreds of searches a day like I do.
If you are a Firefox user, you can install a similar add-on that will block unwanted results from Google. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any good solutions for IE and Safari, so if you’re using those browsers, you’re out of luck. If you know how to do this in these browsers, let us know in the comments. Enjoy!
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