One site ranks 7 times, duplicated over countrry TLDs

[londrum]

got a good example of how messed up the serps are at the moment.

this is difficult to show without including the search term, so you can check it out, so i'll try and add it on and see if the mods let it through.
i am not associated with the term in any way. i was just planning a little holiday.

search for 'captain bligh house london +rating' on google.com

the serps show tripadvisor taking up the first SIX entries, plus number eight too. which means that tripadvisor gets SEVEN entries inside the top ten!

it seems that google are counting their co.uk, .in, .com and .au domains as totally independant sites, ranking each one on merit. but when you click through and view them, they all contain the same content, and the same reviews.

this is obviously not how its supposed to be. i think google needs to do some more tweaking.

[tedster]

Those are different domains with just slightly different content around basically the same page. It is surprising that Google doesn't filter out the duplication any better.

If anything, I'd say it looks like a niche query term than could use some better competition. You're right, it's not a very useful set of URLs on the top ten,

[londrum]

and there's another 3 on the next page too, and 3 more on the next. so the same site appears 13 times in the top 30.

... just noticed that this webmasterworld thread shows up on page 2 as well, and i only posted it 1 hour ago.

how is that? this thread only contains one mention of the phrase. it's not in the title and has zero relevant backlinks. and webmasterworld is completely unrelated to the subject matter (hotels).

there are plenty of other sites below it that are far more relevant to the searcher, so why does google rank this thread so high? it must be something to do with trust. webmasterworld's trust is taking it above other relevant sites, even for a totally unrelated term. that's another thing they need to tweak.

[Robert Charlton]

This is another example of the core phrase hardly occurring on the web at all. If you put the first three words in quotes, you'll see that Google ends up displaying only 25 results before it kicks in the dupe filters, and that (at quick glance, anyway) all the pages that are useful are on tripadvisor domains.

It's also another example of why it's good to avoid specific search terms here when we can. On phrases that are not very common, WebmasterWorld will inevitably do well.