Google Search Console Regular Expressions Gets Exclusions Support

Jun 3, 2021 • 7:41 am | comments

(0) by Barry Schwartz

| Filed Under Google Search Engine Optimization

Prev Story Next story

Google launched the ability to use regular expressions to do advanced filtering in Google Search Console in April. But what was not supported was the ability to use regular expressions to exclude patterns in your filters. Google added support for negative matching using regular expressions in the performance reports yesterday.

Google said "the Performance report filter supports both matching and not matching regex filters." You can access this within the Google Search Console performance report filters through a secondary dropdown, which appears after picking the "Custom (regex)" option in the filter selector. Here is a screenshot:

This is funny because the other day, Kaitlin McMichael, an SEO manager at Amazon Web Services, asked John Mueller and Daniel Waisberg from Google if Google can add this feature. She said on Twitter "Anyone good at RegEx and figured out a way to express exclusions for Queries in Google Search Console's Performance report? I'd like to be able to exclude some queries via RegEx but it looks like Google Search Console's documentation for RegEx filtering does not support lookahead."

Anyone good at RegEx and figured out a way to express exclusions for Queries in Google Search Console's Performance report? I'd like to be able to exclude some queries via RegEx but it looks like Google Search Console's documentation for RegEx filtering does not support lookahead
— Kaitlin McMichael (@Kakefin) June 1, 2021

Then Daniel Waisberg, a Google Search Advocate with the Google Search Console team said "maybe we can do that." Of course, John Mueller of Google, same team, said maybe not to make promises...