It might seem confusing at first, but choose one of the three ways to exclude words and it will become more simple. Think of a typical Google search that removing thumbnails from google chrome you would make that doesn’t exclude any words. The algorithm brings back a list of results it thinks will be the most relevant for you, personally.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use the minus (-) sign operator with other operators to exclude words from google search. Plus, we’ll throw in a couple of bonus tips so you can use the minus sign like a pro. Start improving the accuracy of your searches by using the three primary search operators that exclude words from the search. For instance, Google analyzes not only the candidate page, but also the pages linking into it to determine the value of the candidate page for your search.
Nor does it seem to work a lot of the time anyway—it’s definitely hit and miss. This operator doesn’t play nicely with most other operators. You can also use Content Explorer to find sites in your niche that have never linked to you. For those who haven’t seen this one before, it uncovers so-called “write for us” pages in your niche—the pages many sites create when they’re actively seeking guest contributions. The filetype operator does also support things like .asp, .php, .html, etc. For this reason, it’s easy to forget about old files you may have uploaded.
Open up your web browser and go to to perform a basic search in the search box. ClickMinded is where 8,702 startups, agencies, entrepreneurs and students learn SEO, get higher rankings, and more traffic. For example, you might use this if you’re looking for vacation ideas but want to avoid a specific destination. Smartphones have made it possible for anyone with an internet connection to look for information with a simple type on the search box.
The “-” and “+” operators only apply to the word directly attached to the operator. When Boolean operators are used, spaces between words are treated as an implied “and” until another operator is used in the query. I hope you enjoyed this guide on how to remove keywords from Google search. The next step is to click on the three dots next to a keyword you want to exclude from your search history and choose “Remove from History”. It is important to notice that you should to not have a space between the minus sign and the term. In effect, if you search for [salsa – dancing] with that space in there, you are just saying .
This highlights the sites that have never linked to you before, so you can then prioritise them. You can also use the “In title” search in Content Explorer to find competitor reviews. For example, let’s assume I was looking for more SEO-related link prospects. Divide the second number by the first—if it’s above 0.5, it’s a good, relevant prospect; if it’s above 0.75, it’s a super-relevant prospect. In the example above, we’re looking for similar sites to Ahrefs’ blog—not Ahrefs as a whole. Unfortunately, Google search ignores square brackets (even if they’re in quotes).
If a user’s personally identifiable information changes , we provide a way to correct or update that user’s personal data provided to us. If a user no longer desires our service and desires to delete his or her account, please contact us at customer- and we will process the deletion of a user’s account. Pearson Education, Inc., 221 River Street, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030, presents this site to provide information about products and services that can be purchased through this site. Including a stop word in a search normally does nothing but slow the search down, which is why Google excises them. As an example, Google takes the queryhow a toaster works, removes the words “how” and “a,” and creates the new, shorter query toaster works. This search will surface results about SEO guides but will exclude the ones that contain the sentence in quotation marks.
Google has noticed a huge rise in searches containing “near me”. Because of this, they are showing a lot more automatic results for many things if you just type in hospital or restaurant. Focusing more on intent they can use machine learning to show the most relevant results to a user. These can be used in conjunction with keywords to include or exclude different results.
Parentheses are used to group words and expressions so that the result of evaluating the expression between the parentheses can be used as part of a more complex query. Before/100 retrieves documents with the name “Bill Clinton” within 100 words of the name “Hillary Clinton” A successful version of the above query. Note that all operators within a proximity expression must themselves be proximity operators. Quotation marks tell the search engine to return documents if and only if they contain the exact phrase or string of words between quotes. Any pages that contain the word “iPhone” on their article won’t be returned to the search result. You may add more terms to exclude, like “best smartphone -iPhone -Samsung -Motorola”.
These do a great job, but Google doesn’t have everything figured out yet. This is partly because the amount of content and web pages continue to expand at exponential rates. Sometimes you could use a little help to find exactly what you need.