Google announced on the Search Liaison Twitter account that it has updated its search results to show a more diverse set of search results. This means Google will aim to show no more than two results from the same domain for a particular query in the top results.
More diverse Google results. Over the years, searchers and SEOs have complained that Google sometimes shows too many top search results from the same domain. For specific queries, it wasn’t unusual to see 4 or 5 of the top ten results from the same domain. With this update, Google seeks to limit this to no more than two results from the same domain.
Google stated, “A new change now launching in Google Search is designed to provide more site diversity in our results.” This site diversity change means that you usually won’t see more than two listings from the same site in the top results.
But not always. Google reserves the right to show more than two results from the same domain when it believes it is appropriate. Google added, “However, we may still show more than two in cases where our systems determine it’s especially relevant to do so for a particular search.” This is likely related to branded queries, so for example, searching for Amazon might display more than two results from amazon.com.
Sub-domains. Google will generally treat sub-domains as part of the main domain. For instance, listings from blog.domain.com and www.domain.com will all be considered from the same single site. Google clarified, “Site diversity will generally treat subdomains as part of a root domain.”
However, Google does reserve the right to treat some subdomains differently, stating, “Subdomains are treated as separate sites for diversity purposes when deemed relevant to do so.”
Core results only. This update only impacts the core results and does not affect additional search features such as top stories, video snippets, image carousels, or other vertical search features listed among the web results.
Danny Sullivan from Google clarified on Twitter, “It’s about the main listings, not various other displays on the search results.”
Unrelated to the core update. Google clarified that this site diversity update is unrelated to the June 2019 core update that began earlier in the week. These are two different, unconnected releases. Sullivan confirmed that the site diversity launch started rolling out a couple of days ago and is now fully live.
Technically, analytics and Search Console data can be impacted by both the June 2019 core update and this domain diversity update. However, Sullivan believes they are far enough apart to distinguish between the two updates.
Not an update. Google states this is not really an update and should not significantly impact your site. Sullivan added, “Personally, I wouldn’t think of it like an update, however. It’s not really about ranking. Things that ranked highly before still should. We just don’t show as many other pages.” Nevertheless, it changes how some URLs appear in the search results.
It’s not perfect. Despite this update, you may still find examples of Google showing more than two results from a single domain for a search result set. Google acknowledges, “It’s not going to be perfect. As with any of our releases, we’ll keep working to improve it,” when presented with an example of too many results from Yelp.com.
History. Over the years, Google has repeatedly updated how domain diversity works in search. In 2010, it made a change to the ranking algorithm to make it easier to find numerous results from a single site. In 2012, it began to swing back to more domain diversity in search results, and in 2013, it aimed to show fewer results from the same domain name. There have likely been numerous changes to domain diversity, some unconfirmed by Google.
Why we should care. This update can impact those aiming to dominate specific queries with multiple pages from the same domain. This is often seen in the reputation management industry but applies to other search areas as well. If you have sites with two or more pages ranking for the same Google query, you will want to track the impact of this Google update.
