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The slash that locked up Google’s search results: What went wrong and how to fix it



When you do a Google search, you get results from all types of domains including .com, .org, .gov and .edu. Often, that works out well since Google does a pretty good job of showing you what it considers relevant results, but sometimes you might want to refine your search.




The slash that locked up Google’s search results




Both return the same "your query contains a character that is ignored" warning on the right side of the search bar. My escaping doesn't seem to be doing anything and the results I get are with the characters ignored.


I was searching for action$ in the redux-logic repo and was at least able to filter out all the other unwanted action (without the dollar-sign) results which were showing up in the github search. In Google i typed (pay attention to the quotes):


Unfortunately though, google won't list all results. That's why i wrote semi at the beginning. So you can try your luck quickly with google, if you don't find what you were looking for, fallback to checking out the git repo + search with offline-tools like vscode, intellij or cmd-line-tools as suggested by @Ran Ever-Hadani


Why do this? Blekko told me earlier this month, when talking about the new feature, that it has found slashtags produce better results for these categories of searches. Using slashtags does a search against a set of hand-selected sites, which Blekko says eliminates spam and other irrelevant material.


I like having more voices, and Blekko puts a third one back into the mix. Of course, Ask.com remains out there as a pre-existing third voice. However, the future of Ask crawling the web, to produce its own search results, seems unlikely.


Please note, however, that this technique is not flawless. In my testing, while this approach does find many profiles with the target current title, it does not actually find EVERY profile with the target current title. You can test this for yourself by running back-to-back external X-Ray and internal LinkedIn searches.


These results provide SOME insight, because they return the same number of results as search #4 that used the question marks. This leads me to believe that the question mark is actually ignored, because it returns the same number of results as the string that simply has spaces on either side of the asterisk.


Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. It can also give you a window into which pages are ranking well, and which pages Google has chosen to ignore.


When Google is crawling your site, it means that your pages are being discovered and looked at to determine if their information is worthy of being indexed. Indexing means that those pages have been analyzed by Google's crawler ("Googlebot") and stored on index servers, making them eligible to come up for search engines queries.


This is where you can do a dive-deep into all of the technical issues that are potentially preventing your website from ranking higher in search results. There are four types of issues: Error, Valid with warnings, Valid, and Excluded.


A duplicate URL is an example of a page that is accessible through multiple variations even though it is the same page. Common examples include when a page is accessible both with and without a backslash, or with a file extension at the end. Something like yoursite.com/index.html and yoursite.com, which both lead to the same page.


A canonical tag is a single line in your HTML that tells search engines which version of the URL they should prioritize, and consolidates all link signals to that version. They can be extremely beneficial to have and should be considered.


If a page is indexed in search results, but then suddenly gets blocked with a robots.txt file, Google will typically keep the page in the index for a period of time. This is because many pages are blocked accidentally, and Google prefers the noindex directive as the best signal as to whether or not you want content excluded.


Make sure to provide a detailed framework of all the page content that needs to be indexed through the use of structured data. This allows search engines to not only index your content but for it to come up in future queries and possible featured snippets.


Even though Google discovered the URL it did not feel it was important enough to spend time crawling. If you want this page to receive organic search traffic, consider linking to it more from within your own website. Be sure to promote this content to others with the hope that you can earn backlinks from external websites. External links to your content is a signal to Google that a page is valuable and considered to be trustworthy, which increases the odds of it being indexed.


If a replacement for the page that triggers the 404 error exists on your website, you should create a 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the new URL. This prevents Google, and your users, from seeing the 404 page and experiencing a broken link. It can also help you maintain the majority of any search traffic that had been going to the old page.


In this case the fact that your competitor have his double slashed link is working in your advantage.About the extensions I would recommend to hide your extension with .htaccess mod Rewrite it looks more comfortable for the users and you get a shorter link which is more comfortable for the SEO.


Until you can install the Windows Update fix release, you can set a registry key that will cause Outlook to stop using the local Windows Search service. When this registry key is set, Outlook will use its own built-in search engine. The built-in search will display the message below to indicate it is not using the Windows Search service.


You can use the site to find something from a specific website and limit your search to that single site. For example, you may use it to find the contact page or link opportunities of a specific site.


The inurl: operator followed by a keyword lists all search results that include the keyword somewhere in their URL. This can be helpful when finding guest post opportunities, contact pages, or potential direct competitors.


Simply write two search operators and put the OR command in capital letters between them. This tells Google to show results that satisfy either the first or the second condition. You can also use the pipe symbol instead of OR.


With this Google search operator, you can get results where your search terms are close to each other. The AROUND(X) operator can be used to define the maximum distance between the two keywords. The X in the brackets is how many words at most can separate the two keywords.


The daterange: operator will show search results within a range of dates that you specify. It is a bit tricky because it uses the Julian date format, so you need to put the year followed by the number of days since the beginning of the year. Use an online converter to get the right date format!


A quick note on this one: the link: Google operator was deprecated by Google in 2017, and it may show inconsistent and unreliable results. However, it still brings back results that may be useful as a starting point for your research.


This feature allows you to control which URL path the SEO Spider will crawl using partial regex matching. It narrows the default search by only crawling the URLs that match the regex which is particularly useful for larger sites, or sites with less intuitive URL structures. Matching is performed on the encoded version of the URL.


By default custom search checks the raw HTML source code of a website, which might not be the text that is rendered in your browser. You can switch to JavaScript rendering mode to search the rendered HTML.


Crafting original content in 2017 requires wading into the sea of content that's already been created, and Google remains the most complete map of that sea. Advanced search operators are invaluable research tools for content marketers. Let's walk through a sample content journey...


Anyone who's ever run a Google search understands this, but there's an important point here that we often overlook. Whenever you string together more than one word in a Google search, Google connects them with a logical AND. This is true of both keywords and operators. If you combine operators, Google will assume that you meant AND and will try to meet all conditions.


This is a lot closer to what you probably expected. Notice the highlighting in the second result, where Google seems to have matched "AC-DC". This is a lot closer than the previous attempt, but Google is still taking some liberties with the forward slash. Be sure to do a sanity check of results any time you use non-alphanumeric characters in a search.


Browsing these results, you can see quickly that Tesla is also a band and a unit of measurement. In addition, Tesla the company makes products other than cars. Keyword exclusions are also called "negative keywords" (thus the minus sign).


The "site:" operator is an advanced command that lets you specify a specific domain you want to search on. We usually think of it as a technical SEO and audit tool, but it can also help you refine content searches. Let's say you remembered reading an article on PBS about Tesla, but lost the URL:


Obviously, the results may still contain synonyms (naturally written content often does), but using exact-match ensures that there will be at least one instance of "discount airfare" in each of the results you get back.


It's not obvious from the search results themselves, but the first result doesn't contain the phrase anywhere in the body of the text. On rare occasion, Google may match a phrase on secondary relevance factors, such as inbound link anchor text.


Interestingly, the second result reveals what happened with our last search. A Reddit post featured an article from The Verge with an alternate title and used that title as the anchor text. Reddit apparently had enough authority to generate a match via the anchor text alone. 2ff7e9595c


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