For the entire time that I have worked in search engine marketing, Google have limited the number of results that could be seen on a results page without a special operator (like a site: search that you would use to review all of the indexed pages on a domain), to just 2 per page.
One way to increase your brands domination of a SERP in this respect was to add some sub-domains to the website, and you would frequently be able to get multiple listings for your site (depending on how many sub-domains you used and the authority they accrued individually).
Early last week, Malcolm Coles spotted that Google was treating brand names quite similarly to site: searches. Here, Malcolm spotted that a number of examples such as “Guardian Football”, “Sky Sports” & “Amazon TV” were all displaying additional listings beyond the normal 2 per site that we have come to know (and maybe love).
Google have now officially announced that this is a deliberate change, with a post about how they are showing more results from a domain.
There are mixed feelings amongst the SEO community for this change based on the feedback I have read on Malcolm Coles’ blog and on Twitter.
Personally, I can see some ways where this is an improvement – for example, with regards to affiliates that rank highly for a brand term, and only send traffic and business to a site on that basis – if Google perceive that brand as a suitable authority, then they should now have multiple returned results from their own domain – certainly this has been an issue for a couple of my clients, and this could well prove beneficial (if only this change was being applied to them too).
However, other elements of this are not so useful for the ultimate end user – one of Malcolms example terms “Sky Sports”, is an instance of this – Sky Sports may well have a prominent brand, with a website providing useful news to those looking for it (though it is not my football news destination of choice), but as a product, in the UK, it is not exclusively found on the Sky TV network – it is also sold by Virgin and BT Vision, and by allowing Sky Sports to dominate this search engine results page (SERP) it possibly is damaging to the sales of the product on those 2 platforms.
This could also be good for reputation management issues – it’s not uncommon for us to be asked about what we can do to push a 3rd listing on a SERP down the page so that it isnt quite so visible, when that page in question contains information that a company would rather potential customers would not see – but crucially, is this good for the user?
I know when I am searching, I will look for both sides of an argument to use a service (i.e. the company selling spiel) as well as the reviews – both on the site in question, but particularly if I haven’t used a website before, also their reviews from other sources.
I suspect that users who really want to find this information will still do so – perhaps by modifying their search, or by trawling through deeper pages, but I suspect that a large percentage of users will not. If you want some more examples of where this is displaying, try searching for “BBC” – whilst interestingly a term like “Daily Mail” is not generating the same.
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