Google Listing Same site over and over

[MrFewkes]

Ive just seen my best ever case of google pushing everyone out of the serps (page 1).

The term is two words and there is a site for it www.word1word2

Now - without doubt - if I were the owner of the site - I would be very pleased. Given 600,000 pages in the serp, surely there must be more to put on page 1 than this............

Main Site
Sitelink1 Sitelink2
Sitelink3 Sitelink4
Sitelink5 Sitelink6
Sitelink7 Sitelink8

Main Site/same url as sitelink1

Main Site/same url as sitelink2

Main Site/same url as sitelink3

Main Site/same url as sitelink4

Main Site/same url as sitelink5

Main Site/same url as sitelink6

Another site

Main site .nu

A forum thread from somewhere.

Thats it - the whole of the page 1 serp for word1 word2

Not sure what to say about this. If it happens to my sites I would be pleased - but alas it does not seem to happen even on my exact match domains.

Can anyone beat that for a dross serp?

[tedster]

Was this a phrase where your site used to rank first page? I'd love to get some data about how much traffic is lost by this SERPs change - and how well targeted it was. If Google's decision/logic is sound then it would be minimal, but I do wonder.

Data like this is not easy to find - please share if you have any.

[tigger]

I can't understand G's logic with these multiple pages being displayed - the worst I've seen so far is the top 9 covered by two sites that are clearly owned by the same people as the URLS are almost the same with the same content

All this does is make the serps look spammy and doesn't offer anything to people - hopefully the end result will be surfers moving to B or Y that still just displays one page per site

Keep it up G your going to drive surfers away with all this tinkering C$%£

[tedster]

I can't understand G's logic with these multiple pages being displayed

To me, the theory seems to be like this. For some queries, Google's data showed an overwhelming user preference for results from a given domain - that is, their user data seems to say "this query term has a navigational intent, and non-navigational results are performing very poorly."

Now they may be applying this logic too broadly - and it has been tweaked a few times already. But as usual, Google is focused on what their data tells them about users, en masse.

[MrFewkes]

You know - i believe it would be quite a good thing for 80% of surfers - not a fantastic thing - but ok - nothing to cry over.

Its terrible for review sites, affiliate type sites and of course any other sites which talk about the concept of word1 word2 but dont own the site (remember there are another 600,000 in that serp). Therefore its also not too good for the 20% of surfers. Lets hope they go 10% bing and 10% yahoo.

My %'s are guesswork though.

I seriously wouldnt like to be a competitor in an arena with this going on unless I could win every time.

Tigger - I hope they do go to other engines.

Tedster - I dont understand how they can derive navigational intent - mind you I havent a clue what that is yet.

[tedster]

To understand this it often takes a paradigm shift for the webmaster. Google's purpose has never been to expose as many websites to searchers as they can. Their purpose is to give their users what THEY are looking for - and Bing has the same purpose.

Their data now classifies query terms by the user's apparent intention, based on click data from the SERPs. One kind of user intention is to locate a SPECIFIC website that they already know about. That is what is meant by "navigational intent".

It's most likely a more granular taxonomy than just the three big categories people usually mention (navigational, informational, transactional) but user intention is a major factor for both Google and Bing search results today. Google's just further down the road than Bing.

[goodroi]

lets say i search google for "xyz conference agenda". the old google system would have shown me maximum 2 listings from xyzconference..com and 8 listings from other sites. the new google system will now show me 4 listings from xyzconference..com. (ie day 1 agenda, day 2 agenda etc.) for this example i am better served by google's new system and thus more likely to keep using google as my default search engine.

i spend alot of time in niche markets. most of the websites are under 10 pages with minimal content. there are often just 1 or 2 websites with real content. if someone searches in these niches they will be better served by google returning real content from only 2 sites instead of returning 10 different websites when 8 of them are just glorified business cards.

if google does not make this change and bing does make this change then i would start using bing more often. bottom line - if my user experience is poor or their search results do not satisfy me then i will change my default search engine.