Excluding the Wrong Sites from Search Results

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In the previous post Excluding Non-Resumes: Be Positive I explained how to “think positively” and get non-resumes out of the way when searching for resumes. There’s a different type of “wrong” results that cannot be removed by this strategy. These come from sites that make a special effort to be shown in the search results.

Paid sites that offer resume search certainly know about our

intitle:resume OR inurl:resume …

intitle:CV OR inurl:CV …

templates to find online resumes. They use this page structure (words cv or resume in page titles and URLs) to appear in search results. Two kinds of  “wrong” pages from those sites may show up in Google search:

1) Lists of resumes.

If you search for several keywords and find a list of resumes with previews, usually there’s no one resume in the list with all the keywords present – so the page is completely irrelevant. Here is an example:

2) “Blind” resumes with some important information, such as the name and contact, removed.

Here is an example:

There used to be many more “wrong” results across many searches (not just for resumes). Google is improving its filtering out “spam” sites and there’s not as many as before. Still, some show up in the results.

Blocking the “wrong” sites can be done by “being positive” and including information in search strings, that those sites won’t have, for example, contact email addresses from popular free domains, posted on real resumes:

“gmail.com” OR “yahoo.com” OR “hotmail.com” (etc.)

In this case though “being positive” may not be the easiest approach, since there are too many variations of contact information that people use on resumes.

The most straightforward way to avoid these “wrong” results is to directly exclude these wrong sites. You may start adding to your search string something like

-site:devbistro.com -site:hireitpeople.com -site:postjobsfree.com (etc.)

I would also exclude site:indeed.com; while they have good resumes, I think they are better searched separately with Indeed’s own excellent advanced resume search.

Google used to have a preference setting to list sites to be excluded from all searches but it was dropped some time ago.

Another option to block sites is by installing the Chrome Extension Personal Blocklist. Google will search as usual; this extension will just hide the results from these sites for you in your browser.

Google Custom Search Engines provide yet another option: all sites from a specified list can be excluded from the results. An additional advantage of using CSE’s is that Google will not bug you with Captchas.

If you are interested in a good coverage of Boolean Search basics and hints, check out the live repeat of my “Boolean Strings Basics” webinar along with 2 other popular webinars scheduled in the next few weeks.

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