Google Finally Discontinues The Blocked Sites Feature

After over a year of the blocked sites feature not working, Google has officially declared they are discontinuing the feature — two months after Google promised it would return. Google introduced blocked sites in March 2011 after struggling with various ways to allow searchers to block sites from showing in the search results. Google has […]

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After over a year of the blocked sites feature not working, Google has officially declared they are discontinuing the feature — two months after Google promised it would return.

Google introduced blocked sites in March 2011 after struggling with various ways to allow searchers to block sites from showing in the search results. Google has tried browser extensions, SearchWiki and several other methods over the year.

Now, the only way to block search results is with Google’s official Chrome extension, or maybe some unofficial extensions for Firefox or Chrome.

Google said:

The Blocked Sites feature is no longer available. To block particular sites from your search results, we recommend the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension from Google. You may also download your existing blocked sites list as a text file.

For more details on how this feature worked, see this blog post.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: Blocked sites data had been used as part of Google’s Panda Update to fight against low-quality content. It wasn’t the only thing used, and Google still has some data from those using the Chrome extension. But given that people haven’t been able to use the blocked sites feature for over a year, it’s pretty clear that what was already a secondary factor in the Panda Update must have long since been reduced to practically no factor at all.

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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