Google Negative Keywords

Posted November 5th, 2009 | in Google, How To, Lead Story | No Comments »

Google is a great search engine for finding information. However there’s a lot of stuff out there on the net and sometimes you don’t want it all. Using negative keywords helps you to target your query more precisely.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Suppose that you want to learn about the pirates of old. You head over to Google and enter the search term pirates. Google duly returns you lots of pages about pirates – including many about the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team.

That’s not what you were looking for, so here’s a good place to use negative keywords. Simply add -pittsburgh to your search like this:

Voila! Pittsburgh and its baseball team has been wiped from your search results. Sorry Pittsburgh, nothing personal.

You can combine negative keywords in the same way as any others. If you wanted to avoid all the pirates movies you could use the search query:

You need to be careful when using negative keywords, it’s easy to block search results you really want. In that last example we might have tried to block references to the movie Pirates of the Caribbean by using the negative keyword -caribbean. Unfortunately that would also have blocked lots of pages taking about historical piracy in the region.

Even as it stands the query will block pages with text like this: