Google Puts the Blocks Up With Personal Blocklist

Monday, it is making available a weapon in its arsenal to help toward that end. Google has launched Personal Blocklist, a Google Chrome extension that allows those searching on its search engine to block annoying or off-topic sites from its search results.

“If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results,” Google Principal Engineer Matt Cutts wrote Monday on Google’s official blog. “When you block a site with the extension, you won’t see results from that domain again in your Google search results.”

Google also lets you “revoke” blocks. At the end of the search results list, Google will tell you that some results were blocked, and let you see all results and, if you want, unblock a URL.

This feature only works on Chrome, with the Personal Blocklist extension, so you can’t do the same thing on Firefox, for example. On Chrome, it takes about a minute to install the extension and start your blocking.

So what if you run a small business, and a competitor takes action to wrongfully lower your page rank or even block your web site from Google search results? We’ll probably cross that bridge when we get to it, unless it has been blocked.