Has Google Banned Your Resume?
October 11, 2010 
10 Comments
Do you read Hacker articles? Hm… maybe that’s just me. Anyway, I discovered a very interesting bit of info that cited the “Google Blacklist” which are words that Google does not like. As you can imagine, some of the words are pretty sexual in nature. (Um… No need to mention what those word are, correct?) However, some of the words seemed pretty innocent like “amateur” (with a capital T) and “are” if its after the word blacks or jews or scientologists or behind a number of group names.
As I scanned through the list I thought, “Wow. Some people have too much time on their hands and other body parts.”
And then I wondered would any of these words be on a resume and if so, would that mean that Google would block your resume from being seen in its search results? Hmm… I wondered so I did a bit of experimenting.
- intitle:resume inurl:resume education summa cum laude -your -apply -submit returned 15,300 results
- intitle:resume inurl:resume education domination -your -apply -submit 285 results
- intitle:resume inurl:resume education ecstacy -your -apply -submit 145 results
So it would seem that your resume may not be banned by Google for certain words, which is good to know. I suppose it takes more than one word to trigger a Google ban. Since all of the other words on the resume and (presumably) the website its on do not have sexually explicit language, your work history appears to be safe. Still, with all that being said, I would be very careful about the verbiage in your resume. Why? Although Google is able to figure out that your resume is not a porn site, how will the various applicant tracking systems handle your work history? Will they think its something naughty and banish it from the company’s blackhole of a resume database? Its possible, (like anything is possible I suppose) but I do not know for sure.
Hmm… that would be an interesting study.
Jim
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Wow. Who would have ever dreamed that you would have to be careful about whether you put on your resume that you graduated summa cum laude, still an amazing accomplishment. There are plenty of other words on the Google Blacklist that are not sexual in nature. It would be an interesting study to learn how many of those might appear in a resume and be wrongly zapped by a bot of some kind.
Graduating at the top of your class and you can’t submit a resume, ridiculous!
What is the world coming too. We seem to be on a crash course leading to nowhere.
Based on this article Google does NOT ban resumes based on words. Sounds like someone trying to make something out of nothing
Once again, keywords that make a “Difference”. Maybe we need a Google dictionary to keep our resume “white Listed”.
You’re kidding, right? The article is about words that cause Google to disable Google Instant for that search. These are words in the “search”, not in the result. So if you search “blacks are”, instant search will be disabled; if you click enter, you’ll still get results. And having one of those banned words doesn’t stop you from coming up in the results.
Interesting article. Google should stick to what they do best… indexing the web. But this does serve to remind us to be careful what we post online for the world to see…. resumes included.
TY for blogging this, it was quite useful and help me a lot!