Prior to this week, Google would only show up to two results from the same domain on a single search result page. Now, Google has confirmed what many are seeing, where a single brand dominates a single page of Google’s search results.
This is not a bug, this is not an anomaly, it is an intentional change to Google’s ranking algorithm. Google said:
Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain.
What I find interesting is the last statement by Google:
We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.
Remember, Google’s Peter Norvig who said, “for the second one [search result], you don’t want something that’s almost the same as the first. You prefer some diversity, so there’s where minority views start coming in.” You prefer diversity. Google is clearly saying that a result from the same site can still be diverse and different enough, even if there are ten results, all from the same site.
On the reputation management front, this is a clear winner for those with reputation management issues.
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” On the reputation management front, this is a clear winner for those with reputation management issues.”
I think people will find that the reputation management benefit is limited to brand value site names. Just typing in a domain name doesn’t guarantee you the expanded results set.
However, this is another signal people can use to determine if Google thinks they have achieved brand value.
Hey Barry, Thanks for the update!
I’ve noticed this change working just find for larger brands. But a lot of smaller, more niche web sites (that I have investigated so far), are not getting the same.
I wonder what the means for those who have an exact match domain name for a highly competitive keyword?
Great Article,
I think its a shame how Google is moving away from “Don’t Be Evil”. This is an obvious advantage for big brands. Hopefully consumers will wise up and begin testing other search engines . Don’t get me wrong, I use Google most the time and place the majority of our search budgets in the engine, however I have seen the level playing field of search diminish over the last 6 years.
Nate
This is interesting. It looks as if Google tries to make searches more accurate, though I wonder how the different pages from a same site are selected.
On the other hand, I saw yesterday a debate in Digitalpoint about the fact that being #1 in Google does not guarantee you automatically a #1 in the local Googles due to the recent trend of Localization in the Big G. The article that sparked this debate was http://www.seo-translator.com/your-google-ranking-is-worthless/.
So taking the lead of this article, i performed the search you mentioned in several local Google sites, with mixed results. For example, in Google India (google.co.in) the top three are indeed from Apple, but #4-6 are local results from Indian companies, followed the again by apple.
So I would assume that though indeed big companies will now grab more attention, it is not so that they will grab the whole page – local results seem to weigh also heavily, specially because the local companies that I mentioned rank (and not all of them) on page 2 of the global Google.com results…
Premium member since 03/2010
For the criteria that Google use , Is that trademark or large enterprise with large indexed of pages or high pagerank website? This is interesting to use for ORM criteria for brand protection.
For me as a user of Google search, this is definitely a negative thing. If I wanted to search the domain, I would have searched for
apple.com iphone
Now I need to specifically exclude it from my search!
It would have been much better to only show one single link from apple.com and then be able to click on “Show more results from this domain”.
They could also be kind enough to offer this to anyone logged in to their services so it becomes a configuration option.
The next step would be to allow people to permanently hide results from specific domains when they search, and make it REALLY easy to hide them. Click on a “Hide” link next to the result and get an option to hide the domain, not just that single result.
Surely many users will look at these results, think they’re getting a very limited choice and try Bing.
I think it is good for user …….. like if a user want to search about google blog then he want to like explore the google blog official website not to other. but its most difficult for google to indentify official website of brand.