Filtering for multiple pages using regex in Google Search Console

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I was recently asked to prepare an overview of a search campaign’s performance over the past 12 months. One of the core parts of our strategy for this particular client was creating landing pages for each of their regional offices.

Though Google frowns upon doorway pages–duplicate pages created with the sole intention of ranking for localised terms–creating a home on a website for each of a business’s offices is good practice for users and a great way to rank for geo-specific searches.

However, due to a quirk with our client’s content management system, there was no pattern to the URLs created, i.e. they were not located in a subfolder. This made filtering for them difficult. Or at least it would have been before Google introduced regex filtering.

Using regex to filter for multiple pages

To filter for multiple pages in Search Console simply type the following into the ‘pages’ regex filter:

.*yourwebsite.com/url-1|.*yourwebsite.com/url-2|.*yourwebsite.com/url-3

In Search Console it should look like this (text in screenshot is clipped):

Click apply and your filter should show the pages that you have specific. Because of the type of regex query we’re using, you don’t have to use ALL of the URL – just the parts that match the specific URL you are looking for.

Why the regex above works

The regex above is fairly simple – it contains only two parts:

.*

The period and asterisk, when used together, instructs Search Console to find any page that contains the text that folllows the asterisk (case sensitive).

The pipe simply separates the queries.

It’s really that simple!