Google’s June 6 diversity update aimed at reducing the number of multiple results from the same websites on SERPs had a fairly minimal impact, according to a new report from Moz.
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 the 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.
To be clear, this analysis looked at the company’s 10,000 keyword data set and did not consider the infinite number of queries this may have impacted. Brand or navigational queries were probably the exceptions when Google said they may indeed show more than two results from the same domain. For instance, someone searching for a specific brand wants to see more results from the official site, and Google likely will show that company’s domain more than two times in such cases.
But there was improvement. Moz analyzed 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 Pete Meyers noted that “improvement hardly seems impressive.”
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 not that substantial, you probably won’t notice much of an impact in your analytics. Since this update overlapped with the June 2019 core update, knowing the limited impact of the diversity update is useful for understanding if your site was affected by the core update, the diversity update, or something else. Overall, most people want to see a more diverse set of Google search results, and Google has made changes toward this goal and is likely to continue improving in the future.
