All About Content

I’m seeing more Google weirdness: the other day, I was doing a vanity search on Google the other day and noticed that there were three results from this blog on the first page.

This is unusual because Google will ordinarily only display 2 results from the same domain on a single search results page, and group them together. It will display the higher ranking page according to where it fits algorithmically and display the next ranked page from that site indented underneath the first.

So if you have pages that independently would rank #1 and #7, Google will display them as #1 and an indented #2. If you have pages that alone would rank #2, #3 and #10, Google’s search engine results page will only display #2 and #3 (indented), giving the #10 spot to the next result that is not on your domain.

For searchers this is useful because you don’t need to skim hundreds of listings from the same site. It’s significant for SEO because it means you will always need multiple domains if you’re tracking to dominate the entire first page of results for a given search — any one domain will yield at most 2 positions.

(Each results page does this independently, so if you have spots #10, #11 and #12, you’ll still see your best listing in the #10 spot, with #11 at the top of the second page and #12 indented below, leaving opportunities to gain more spots on subsequent pages — assuming a standard results display setting of 10 results per page. If the user has Google set to display 100 results, however, then you’re limited to a total of 2 spots in the top 100 positions.)

I’ve seen multiple indented listings from the supplemental index, but never the main search results. If, however, this wasn’t just some flukey thing and Google is thinking of displaying more than two sites per domain per results page, that could impact an SEO strategy that relies on multiple pages from multiple sites being optimized for the same keyword. Even if the new limit were 3 instead of 2, that means in theory you could dominate the entire first page using only 4 domains instead of the 5 separate domains currently needed. You would still need to optimize 10 pages total, but 10 pages on 4 domains might be easier to optimize than 10 pages from 5 domains. Might be. Might not. Either way, that would be an impressive feat.