14 DAY TRIAL // In combating web spam and poor quality websites, Google started enabling users to block certain pages from their search results. Now, Google is expanding the feature to all of its international websites, meaning that all users will be able to remove the results they don't like, banishing them from their future searches.
"In March, we introduced the option for you to block sites from your search results that you might not find useful. Sometimes you’ll click on a result, find that it’s not what you wanted, and head right back to the search results page," Johannes Henkel, search quality engineer at Google, wrote.
"It could be that the result wasn’t quite right for your query, but other times you may be generally dissatisfied with a particular site appearing in your search results. Starting today, you can now block sites on most Google domains," he added.
The block link only shows up when you return to the search page from a page you visited. Now, the same link will show up on internationalized Google searches.
Blocking a domain will remove it from all future search results. Every time it's missing from a list of results, you'll get a notification. The idea is to make your personal searches more relevant, by removing the sites you don't trust or find useful, but which others may like.
You can manage the list of blocked domains from the Search Settings dashboard.
Initially, the action of blocking a domain only affected your results. But Google started looking at this data and using it in the general search algorithm.
This means that sites that are blocked by a lot of users may get lower search rankings. Content farms and poor quality sites should be affected by this change in particular. Google declared war on content farms and similar sites at the beginning of the year.