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Comment by Matt_Cutts

15 years ago

One of the signals that we've said that we use in the Panda algorithm that launched in April is how many users blocked a particular site.

A new launch last week is that you can now import blocked sites from Chrome into Google.com. That way your blocked sites will work wherever you sign in. More info: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/export-your-sites-b...

That reminds me, have you removed the blocking function or does it only work in Chrome?

I tried to find a manual for a particular dishwasher today. Holy crap was the search results useless. With the exception of a site which didn't load and one which was a list of people who wanted to know if anybody else had the manual all other results of the three first pages where made for adsense sites or sites designed to harvest email address.

Which would have been one thing, but not one of them had the damn manual (one tried to suggest the manual for a Macbook air!?).

So it seems you still have a long way to go with Panda.

But the reason I ask is that I couldn't figure out how to ban those sites (I was using my iPad at the time).

  • For me, it works such that you go to a crappy site, navigate backwards to the search results and then a link "- Block all crappysite.com results" appears. It also mentions you need to be "signed in to search".

  • Which dishwasher manual where you searching for? I'd like to do a comparative study of the various search engines and see what I can get.

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!

Is this the only reason why Stack Exchange has been hit or are there other big factors too?

It'd be interesting to know.