Google Adds Regex to Google Search Console

The addition of regex to Google Search Console is pretty nice, especially for companies who have brand names or products that can be typed in multiple ways e.g. using the word “and” or an “&” symbol.

For those of you who have been seeing all the posts about this and are wondering what the hubbub is about, Regular expressions, also known as regex, is a way to do an advanced search and replace for strings of words or characters.

Regex is particularly useful in GSC because it allows you to filter multiple search term queries by defining a regex filter.

For example, let’s say you sell peanut butter and jelly sandwiches online (if you do, send me a link, I could go for one right now).

You could set a query: “peanut butter and jelly|peanut butter & jelly|pb&j” that captures all the search term variations of peanut butter and jelly in your GSC reporting.

About the Author

Matt Chiera

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Matt Chiera is the Founder and CEO of Ice Nine Online. Since forming the company in 2014, he’s helped Ice Nine Online’s small and mid-size clients generate millions of dollars in sales from digital marketing. Matt taught digital marketing strategy and tactics at the Tribeca School’s Digital Professional Institute. Matt’s book “Digital Marketers Sound Off” has been ranked as the #1 book in the Web Marketing category on Amazon.