1. Home
  2. Web
  3. Exclude a domain from google search results

How To Exclude A Domain From Google Search Results

Google’s search results have become less accurate over the past. In its earlier days, Google’s search results were far more relevant and that is basically what gave it the market share it enjoys today. It’s still better than Bing though so its market share isn’t going anywhere even if the results aren’t as good as they used to be. If you’re trying to search for something, and a particular irrelevant domain or URL keeps appearing in the results you can remove it. Here’s how you can exclude a domain from Google search results.

Exclude Domain From Google Search Results

Google search supports lots of search modifiers. You might be familiar with some of them e.g. the site: modifier lets you search a particular website for a keyword or phrase. The type: modifier lets you search for files that are a particular format e.g. PNG or PDF. A similar search modifier exists that lets you exclude a domain from Google search results. You can use it exclude a domain or a particular URL.

Search Modifier

The search modifier that can exclude a domain from Google search results is;

-inurl:

Syntax

Search query -inurl:domain

or

Search query -inurl:URL

Example

Reddit videos -inurl:videos
Reddit videos -inurl:Reddit.com

Usage

The search modifier can be used to exclude both a URL or a domain from the search results. If you want to exclude a domain from Google search results, entering it without the www or .com bit is enough. Excluding a particular URL can be a little trickier.

Start by entering the entire URL after the modifier to see if does the trick. This will usually work except in the case of URL redirects that are cached. In this case, enter a unique part of the URL that you know will exclude the URL you want to filter out but will not affect other relevant URLs. If a URL isn’t user friendly i.e. it’s numbers you might want to include the domain name as well because other relevant search results might have numbers in the URL and you will effectively be filtering them out which isn’t what you want.

You can use this search modifier with other search modifiers that Google supports though you should be careful how you pair them up. Google search doesn’t correct the use of modifiers like it does misspelled words in your search query. If using a search modifier results in zero or too few search results, you should try to limit or broaden, whichever is suitable, the conditions of the modifier.

2 Comments