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How do I exclude websites from my queries?

Excluding a website means that articles or posts from that site will no longer appear in your search results. This helps you filter out irrelevant or spam-like sources and keep your monitoring focused and clean. In this article, we'll delve deeper into excluding certain websites from searches.

Why would I want to exclude websites?

Sometimes you don't want to see everything that appears online. A website might be irrelevant to your organization, post a lot of irrelevant or duplicate content or create 'noise' in your results, causing you to miss important messages.

Excluding such sites keeps your search results clear and focused on what matters.

How do I exclude a website?

A website exclusion looks like this: 

NOT site:drimble.nl

The easiest way is to add the exclusion at the end of your search query:

(chatbot OR agent) AND (ai OR “kunstmatige intelligentie”) NOT site:drimble.nl

Want to exclude one specific website? Follow these steps:

  1. Open the search query where you want to apply the exclusion.
  2. Use the operator NOT to tell the system what you don’t want to see.
  3. Use site: or website: to refer to the domain:
    • site: excludes one specific (e.g. drimble.nl)
    • website: also excludes all subdomains subdomeinen (e.g. blogspot.com includes all blogs on that domain: ****.blogspot.com)
  4. Make sure there’s a space after NOT, then add site: followed by the domain. E.g. NOT site:drimble.nl
  5. Save your query and you're done! Posts from that website will no longer appear in your results.

Watch the video below from Spotler Engage expert Marije where she shows you how to do this.

Can I exclude multiple websites at once?

Want to exclude multiple websites? It is possible to create an exclusion container to group all the websites you want to exclude. This keeps your query organized and readable for you and your colleagues. You only need to use the site: operator once, as the system understands it's a group of sites.

An exclusion container looks like this:

  • NOT site:(drimble.nl OR oozo.nl OR fok.nl)
  • NOT website:(blogspot.com OR wordpress.com)
  • NOT (site:(drimble.nl OR oozo.nl OR fok.nl) OR website:(blogspot.com OR wordpress.com))
What should I watch out for?

When excluding websites, keep this things in mind:

  • Spelling: A typo in the domain means the exclusion won't work.
  • Space after NOT: Don't forget the space after NOT. Without this. the system won't see it as an exclusion.
  • Be sure: Think carefully before excluding an entire siste, there might still be relevant content on that site.
Can I re-include previously excluded websites?
You can always remove a site from your exclusion query if you want to include it again. Just edit your query and delete the exclusion.
Can I also exclude source types in my query?
Yes, you can exclude source types too, like blogs, forums, news or social media. Say you only want news to show and no blogs, then you can exclude blogs as a source type. You do this with the operator NOT sourcetype:
Filtering by source type helps keep your results clean and relevant.

Pro tip

Do you always want to exclude the same websites? Creating a seperate search query with those domains is an excellent way to reuse it. This is called a nested search. With nested search, you refer to one query inside another one. This is how you do that:

  1. Create a query like this: site:(oozo.nl OR drimble.nl OR 112nieuws.nl OR alarmeringen.nl) and call this Spam websites for example.
  2. Reuse it in another query like this: NOT searchquery:"Spam websites".
  3. Now you only have to maintain the exclusion list in one place and reuse it whenever needed.

Want to know how to create a successful search query? Check out this article for a detailed step by step guide: Starting with successful queries