Remove SEO whoring domains from Google Search results

[Steve McQueen]

If you're like me, you hate seeing certain domains in your searches; mostly the ones that game the system by creating garbage content. Demand Media and all of their evil spawn etc.

They are making google search results like a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.

Google refuses to allow users to block domains from results, so here is how you can do it.

ff 3: 'custom google search' addon

ff 4: 'custom google search' with 'add-on compatability reporter' (which will allow you to enable the custom search addon because it isn't officially supoorted with ff4. You will have to add the domains manually though as the handy icons in the search results don't work yet.

Chrome: create your own custom search engine at http://www.google.com/cse/

You can add domains to the do not search list. You cannot set your custom search engine as your default engine in the chrome omnibox however. But you can bookmark the custom page easily enough.

some quotes from an article: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/all/1---->

But none has gone about it as aggressively, scientifically, and single-mindedly as Demand. Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.
The process is automatic, random, and endless, a Stirling engine fueled by the world’s unceasing desire to know how to grow avocado trees from pits or how to throw an Atlanta Braves-themed birthday party. It is a database of human needs, and if you haven’t stumbled on a Demand video or article yet, you soon will. By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year. Demand is already one of the largest suppliers of content to YouTube, where its 170,000 videos make up more than twice the content of CBS, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera English, Universal Music Group, CollegeHumor, and Soulja Boy combined. Demand also posts its material to its network of 45 B-list sites — ranging from eHow and Livestrong.com to the little-known doggy-photo site TheDailyPuppy.com — that manage to pull in more traffic than ESPN, NBC Universal, and Time Warner’s online properties (excluding AOL) put together. To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.
​

​

....

Volume is also crucial to Demand’s top distribution partner, Google. The search engine has struggled to make money from the 19 billion videos on YouTube, only about 10 percent of which carry ads. Advertisers don’t want to pay to appear next to videos that hijack copyrighted material or that contain swear words, but YouTube doesn’t have the personnel to comb through every user-generated clip. Last year, though, YouTube executives noticed that Demand was uploading hundreds of videos every day — pre-scrubbed by Demand’s own editors, explicitly designed to appeal to advertisers, and cheap enough to benefit from Google’s revenue-sharing business model. YouTube executives approached Demand, asked the company to join its revenue-sharing program, and encouraged it to produce as many videos as possible.
Since then, the two companies have grown even closer. When YouTube’s sales team bemoaned the tiny supply of Spanish-language videos for it to run advertisements against, YouTube’s Hoffner called up Demand. Within weeks, Demand Studios started issuing Spanish-language assignments. Soon it had uploaded a few hundred clips to YouTube — everything from how to be “un buen DJ” to how to fix a bathroom towel bar. “I know we do deals with the ESPNs and ABCs of the world, but Demand is incredibly important to us,” says Hoffner (who is married to wired’s executive director of communications). “They fill up a lot of content across the site.”
​

​

I hope someone finds this useful 😛

 

[abaez]

Can you provide an example of a search result with this company in it?

 

[rlyely]

good idea; do you know why those SEO domains can't be removed or filtered?

 

[Steve McQueen]

Can you provide an example of a search result with this company in it?

http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&expIds=17259,17311,18167,23756,24878,27400&xhr=t&q=replace+spark+plugs&cp=11&pf=p&sclient=psy&safe=off&aq=0&aqi=&aql=&oq=replace+spa&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=cba0178b09ca64e2

ExpertVillage.com, ehow, experts-exchange, About.com, Mahalo, answers.com Livestrong.com...there are dozens of them. It's like yahoo answers except it is presented as expert advice and it spams search results.

no real editors, no fact checking, no expert advice...just poor freelance content creators writing and videoing about stuff they have no experience or education in. This type of thing is going to be growing exponentially over the next few years.

good idea; do you know why those SEO domains can't be removed or filtered?rlyely

two reasons: 1) Google makes money off these companies, and not just because of of adsense. Google has the search data-->these companies need that info to know what kind of content to create-->revenue sharing partnership. 2) if Google made domain blocking easy for its users, it wouldn't be long before there would before nice handy one-click-install-maintainance free 'adblock' type things were available. Google wants to control what search results people are presented with and they aren't going to give that up.

I'm not anti goog or anything, I just want to be able to block irritating spam content creators from my search results.

 

[wwswimming]

it's simple - Google SOMETIMES manipulates search results at the request of their advertisers.

to know when that is the case, you'd have to be one of the websites affected - or work inside Google.