There are browser extensions for blacklisting domains from your Google searches. I've been so incredibly happy using one if them. If I see one of those despicable content farms I just blacklist it and move on. Often when I search on Google for technical stuff I only get 2 visible results on the first page, 1 SO and 1 documentation. Soooo relaxing.
The business reasons why Google doesn't take steps to remove the bad content and make their product pleasant to use again is so far from my understanding it might well be aliens running the company for all I know.
People literally curate lists of websites that are only spam, and provide no value in search results[1]. Even if Google only cared a little bit about blocking the worst 1% of websites they don't already block, they would simply copy these lists, or use them as a starting point. Let alone devoting actual resources of their own. But they don't even do that.
Luckily on Kagi I can just block sites the moment I realize it is nonsense.
Or boost or even pin sites that I feel are extra valuable.
Back in the old days I had a txt-file on my desktop containing domains with a minus in front, llke -example.com -example.org for all the worst offenders, so that I could post them on the end of every contested search.
After a while I think Google found a way to ignore those as well as every other filter I had - at least I gave it up.
Why doesn't Google block sites manually (sites that are obviously bad)?
Off-topic, but I've always thought this is the main reason Google Blog Search isn't very good. In the quest to make an all-algorithm blog search, Google sacrificed having one at all. If they had simple restricted the search to blogspot.com, wordpress.com, and typepad.com, and applied the normal spam filters, it could have been pretty good!
In my opinion, back then, they needed the data as a training set for spammy domain detection. Now that SERP spam is no longer a serious issue (in Google's eyes anyway), why bother. Google always knows what's best for you.
This is really the core of my disappointment in Google: their poor handling of malicious SEO. Having humans go over shared site blocklists that people use to improve results, hand verify each entry, and remove those sites from Google results would go a long, long way.
However when I added Pinterest to my personal block list, I had to add: pinterest.com, .ie, .nz, .uk, .au, etc etc you get the idea.
It was actually that cancerous link spam behaviour that made me block them in the first place, as it diluted the quality of my Google results enough to force me into taking action.
I really feel bad for people who aren't savvy enough to know that blocking things like bad search result or advertisments is an option.
When a site gets blocked by Google, it doesn't disappear from the internet but all of a sudden it disappears to hundreds of millions of people. Poof. Gone.
If a site gets ranked lower, then it won't get as much traffic but at least its still findable. Even spammy sites deserve a chance to turn their shit around (although it almost never happens).
If I want to block a site for just me, fine. There's browser extensions that do that. However, when Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo lets you do it and then uses that data in ranking sites for other people there's a Big Filter Problem.
I'm not even sure how much manually blocking domains would help remedy the problem with Google results, which is that so much of the top hits are copy-pasted blog spam with very little information, scrambled together (very possibly by a non-human) purely to game SEO.
It seems like it's gotten even worse just in the past few months. I'll try to Google something common, like "can you feed X to dogs" and all the results I find are these giant "articles" that aren't even about that specific thing. Instead it's a giant wall of text with commonly-Googled questions, and if you ctrl+F to the section you were looking for, the answer is usually horrible, and why should you be trusting information from this website anyway?
Then you go back and click through other results and find an entirely different website with all the exact same text on it.
Top recipe results are also all copy-pasted SEO spam surrounded by a wall of text about the history of the recipe, and how the author is a "country mom" (definitely not a man at a content farm in India), hiding the recipe deep within.
They must be pumping out all these fake dedicated websites at such a high rate that blocking domains won't get you anywhere.
The real question is, why are these content farm sites indexed at all? They are spam, and should be blocked, just like the way GMail blocks spam. They should never appear in any search result for anything ever, let alone be ranked first!
If someone simply took Google and just applied a huge blocklist so that garbage sites like those never got indexed, it would be the perfect search engine.
Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to just ban them, I've totally gotten answers to questions from there before (at first using Google cache, until someone showed me the now-stupidly-obvious-in-retrospect scroll-down-to-the-bottom technique), so I know banning them from my listings will make my life slightly worse, and I can always ignore them.
Which, I guess, is a mindset that I think generally makes this concept not terribly useful: you can always personally ignore some domains that suck. The real issue is how many places have duplicate content, or even stupidly "reblogged"/"syndicated" content, that show up when you search for something: the domains for that are often very search-specific.
Google used to have a feature where you could filter out whole domains for any reason. I wonder why they don't bring that back and then use that as a (non-determinative) signal for deciding which domains to ban themselves. They index a lot of sites obvs but you'd think a user-curated list of the top 100 or 1000 spammy domains would be useful info to have.
The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google.
Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google would show me the actual domain registrars instead (like chatgpt does when i ask it). Google has been gamed so badly and they have been doing nothing about it just because the spam blog posts contains their ads.
There are some tricks I learned on HN to use uBlock origin to filter these spam sites but Google really needs to fix this. There is only so much an adblocker can do to fix search. And right now all the useful content is getting blocked while the spam content is not only allowed but ranking on top of everything.
This is a decades-old spammer trick. Google used to not rank brand new domains very high for this reason.
It's hard not to think that the only reason Google abandoned most of its old site ranking heuristics was that they were filtering out too many sites with lots of Google ads. The spam sites now infesting Google's first-page results don't look very different from the spam sites I saw back in the early 2000's. (There's more JavaScript, but modern search spiders run every page in a VM before reading the DOM, so that doesn't fool anyone.)
I don't want Google to block any sites. I don't need nor want a personalized internet filter bubble. What I want Google to do is learn to recognize spammy or irrelevant sites and rank them lower.
Eventually someone was going to create an easy to list/share/subscribe list that individuals could easily add to their personal Google domain block list. Think EasyList.
At that point they would be bleeding ad revenue as all the nasty, fake, abusive, spammy websites would be insta blocked.
Imagine being able to add a list and all of a sudden half the SEO blogs are excluded from results. Assuming Google even allows it, they would then have to work even harder to find relevant content to your search query. They can't rely on throwing a huge wall of semi-relevant results that you have to wade through, generating ad impressions as you go along.
Google, with blacklisted domains. I wish an actual better alt existed.
I didn't 'try to pick on' - I pointed out two garbage results in a query that they literally push you to from the home page as examples for potential customers. If those results aren't doing what people claim (not highlighting seo spam) then I'm not really left with any faith that the queries they don't elevate to their home page will be better.
If you use Greasemonkey / Tampermonkey, etc. you might want to check out 'Google hit Hider by domain'[0] [in spite of the name, it works on several search engines, not just Google]. It provides a really simple interface to ban [with various levels of extreme prejudice] sites from ever again appearing in your search results.
1. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension...
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