Google Starts Allowing Users To Block Sites: Worse For Content Farms Or Parked Pages?
According to a post on its blog, Google as of today is allowing users to block sites as they surf.
“You’ll start seeing a new option to block particular domains from your future search results. ”
“Now when you click a result and then return to Google, you’ll find a new link next to “Cached” that reads “Block all example.com results.”
“Once you click the link to “Block all example.com results” you’ll get a confirmation message, as well as the option to undo your choice. ”
“You’ll see the link whether or not you’re signed in, but the domains you block are connected with your Google Account, so you’ll need to sign in before you can confirm a block.”
“Once you’ve blocked a domain, you won’t see it in your future search results.”
“The next time you’re searching and a blocked page would have appeared, you’ll see a message telling you results have been blocked, making it easy to manage your personal list of blocked sites. This message will appear at the top or bottom of the results page depending on the relevance of the blocked pages.”
You can see a list of your blocked sites in a new settings page, which you can access by visiting your Search Settings or clicking on the “Manage blocked sites” link that appears when you block a domain. On the settings page you can find details about the sites you’ve blocked, block new sites, or unblock sites if you’ve changed your mind.
“We’re adding this feature because we believe giving you control over the results you find will provide an even more personalized and enjoyable experience on Google. 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. ”
“The new feature is rolling out today and tomorrow on google.com in English for people using Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+, and we’ll be expanding to new regions, languages and browsers soon. We hope you find it useful, and we’ll be listening closely to your suggestions.”
It could be argued that the mostly likely sites to be blocked are parked pages, adult sites and/or sites users do not find useful.
If anyone in a household blocks a site it will prevent it from being seen by anyone else unless each user has their own Google account and logs in and out each time the computer is used.
I guess that’s true for any shared computers.
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They will eventually roll this out to everyone’s searches and incorporate all the data they collect into search results… so if you had a parked page that ranked well in Google once they roll this out it will disappear in the SERPs.
Next feature will be to block anything with dot XXX extension or co or net.
Bull
No doubt that will be coming
Just like anything which webmasters perceive will help achieve higher rankings, the blocking of websites could be used against competing sites with multiple IP addresses. But if this is done against legit sites and incorporated into Google search results, does this sort of feature really enhance user experience?
It seems to me that this will hurt content farms, not parked domains really.
After all parked domains are mostly removed from the engines already. My stats show that less than 2% of my referrals are from all search engines combined.
Personal opinion…a single parked page or minisite farticle that showed up in a SERP? Why bother wasting the effort?
On the other hand, (for me) sites like ehow and ezinearticles would be ground zero for this flag. But about.com is fine.
It boils down to any *major* site that shows up day after day in my SERPs and has never really helped out with good info. Batting .250 is ok though, batting .050 would get the flag.
Which sounds exactly like what Google wants this to be.
No need for that chrome extension now eh.
Worse for content farms.
it seems an useless and timewaster function that we all will try once, but noone will use
Why is Google requiring that I first click through to the website before being able to block it from future search results? I’ve clicked-thru to many of these websites for years and already know that I want to block many of them…..
In google.com.ph domain, content farms still dominate the results even though the algorithm has been updated. I think one of the reasons why google did this is to know what sites that are unaffected by the algorithm update.
TLD: They would be dumb to use this data for everyone. Only a tiny subset of the population, mostly techies, will use this feature.
I don’t understand how this would hurt parked domains.
Andrew
You don’t think that parked domains will get blocked more than typical sites?
I agree with Andrew. Search for just about anything about 1000 times. Out of the thousand times how often do you see a parked domain I’m the top 5 results? Maybe 50/1000? You will see a lot of wikipedia, answers.com, ehow, eBay for products (or amazon), Dell for computers, you know all the usual 50 or so sites that make up 80% of googles search results. Googleshoild be called WikiBayZonHowAnswers.com
Parked domains are just sprinkled in, like finding a needle in a haystack. Maybe this will e good for parked domains as it will remove all the large clumps of hay covering up all the needles.
It’s just too much work to block domain after domain 1 by 1, people will web get tired of that if they even go that route or even see that many of them in their results. People will actually see fruits of their blocking labor If thy block wiki et all.
I got 2500 park domains and 50 minisites.At the end of the day they bring me in an average $6 per day.My attitude is ,whatever…i dont care…park or no park.
2500 parked domains and $6 per day?
Uh, you’re doing it wrong.
I can see how people would block parked pages more than other types of sites but someone made a great point that they rarely show up in search engine results anyway. Sounds like a site has to come up in search for you to block it and just being on a domain and thinking, “Man I never want this site to show up in my search results,” and blocking it at that point is not an option.
Since parked pages usually get their visitors from type-in traffic anyways and not from search engine results this Google change will be a lot worse for content farms.
Of course some parked pages will be affected also (the ones that actually show up on the first few pages of the search engine results) but for most parked pages this change will have little to no impact whatsoever.
Hi,
They are becoming ‘control freaks’…like ‘MS’ was/is…
If you do not think that they are not going to use the blocking data they go over in the months and years to come…”To Do No Evil”…. Your High!
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Maybe in their next ‘algorithm shake up’…. they can just drop every website that has two or more miss-spelled words on it. After all, how good of a website could it be if there is some “miss-spelling’s” on it?
I will give them a bit of a head start….
In Google the spelling of this word returns: 4x more results for the ‘miss-spelling’ of it, than it does for the correct spelling.
Correct:
Cybersquatting ~ 288,000
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Incorrect:
Cybersquating ~ 1,140.00
So I say…dump all 1.1 million right now…we cannot have this trash in our SE!
Peace to all!
Dan
btw: this does count as a ‘rant’ by me about Google… beleive me, I have done many in the past…and this falls just short
Hello,
Very Interesting Read For March 14th…
“Didn’t you notice Google’s crown slipping?”
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/03/didnt-you-notice-googles-crown-slipping.html
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Best,
Dan
Please note that to block a site you will need to be signed in! How many people (will) do that?
As for me, I never am signed in when searching and I even have the web history turned off and I also wipe out cookies frequently. But of course I am not that average user the SE is targeting
@Sri
Most people have “Gmail” accounts… once you access your gmail account, you are automatically logged in to almost everything Google…including ‘search’.
Best,
Dan
Parked domains aren’t listed in Google Search (or very seldom) so the content farms and otherwise spammy or low-value content will get the boot from savvy web users who hate wasting their precious time.
That’ll be a good thing for those who create value, however.
It seems the gravy train is coming to a halt for those who spin nothing more than what’s been done elsewhere or which adds nothing to what’s already available, from another (more credible) source.