Google Search is an incredible tool and its advanced search features will more often than not be really helpful in narrowing down the search results to a number that is easy to browse for the user and contains the most relevant information that is available.
Unfortunately, Google Search is not perfect. I found out about one limitation the day we signed a client in the PR Agency I’m working with. The problem there resided in the fact that the brand name of our client was also a very common word in Turkish and was also often used in Indonesian.
If you”ve read my article that explains how I find the mentions of the brand of our clients, you already know how I rely heavily on Google to find the pieces of coverage that we get from our Content Marketing campaigns.
Therefore, I needed to find a way to remove Turkish and Indonesian speaking articles from my search results.
Although Google Search does not provide any modifier that would allow me to perform such a search, there is a small trick that I found takes care of 90% of the results we are trying to hide from our searches. The trick is as follows:
“keyword” -site:.tld
By replacing .tld by the top-level domain name generally associated with the language you want to exclude from Google Search. In my case, searching for the word “house” in Turkish returns 3M results.
But searching for “mesken” -site:.tr returns 2.7M results, effectively removing 300k results that are using .tr as their domain name extension.
Is this solution perfect? No, it is not. The major flaw of this technique is that it’s not going to remove the websites that write in our case in Turkish but are registered as a .com.
But until Google provides a field that allows us to exclude multiple languages such as English or German or entire regions in the Advanced Search parameters, this solution is the best that I’ve found to this day and has so far been extremely helpful for me and my team.
So that’s it. A short article I know but an article that I believe will reveal itself very useful among many companies.
I guess the moral of the story here is that before founding your company, one should ensure the name they are picking does not mean anything offensive in another language but also to make sure that this is not a common word. Your future PR team will be grateful and that can potentially save you heaps of dollars in brand monitoring tools and other resources that you will need to make sure you notice when your brand is being mentioned.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them down below in the comments section and I’ll answer them as quickly as possible 🙂
Until next time.
