Moz: Google’s diversity update was pretty minor

Google’s June 6 diversity update to limit SERPs from showing multiple results from the same websites had a fairly minimal impact of results, according to a new Moz report analyzing their dataset.

Moz’s findings. “While Google technically improved site diversity, the update was narrowly targeted and we had to dig to find evidence of improvement,” wrote Moz’s Pete Meyers. “The impact of the site diversity update doesn’t feel on par with a pre-announcement and the PR it received. Regarding the state of site diversity in SERPs, Google has made minor improvements but still has work to do,” he said.

Just to be clear, this looked at the company’s 10,000 keyword data set, it did not look at the infinite number of queries this may have impacted. Also, brand or navigational queries were probably the exceptions to the rule when Google said they may indeed show more than two results from the same query. Someone searching for a specific brand likely wants to see more results from the official site and Google likely will show that company’s domain more than two times.

But there was improvement. Moz dug into its data and said, “between June 6th and 7th, average diversity did improve marginally, from 90.23 percent to 90.72 percent (a 0.49 percent improvement).” The chart below is zoomed into the data at 10 times and he said “improvement hardly seems impressive.” Here is that chart zoomed in:

Moz then showed results that had two or more listings and looked to see if those overall had a larger change than all the results Moz tracks. It was more noticeable, “On June 6th, 84.58 percent of sites in our data set had a diversity of 80 percent or better. On June 7th, that increased to 86.68 percent — a 2.1 percent improvement,” Moz wrote.

Here is that chart:

Why we should care. Ultimately, if this update was really not that substantial, then you probably won’t see much of an impact from this update in your analytics. Since this update overlapped with the June 2019 core update, knowing the limited impact of the diversity update is useful to understand if your site was impacted by the Core update, the diversity update or something else. Overall, I believe most people want to see a more diverse set of Google search results and Google has made changes towards this and can make additional changes towards this in the future.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.