My name is Scott, an SEO Analyst at Exclusive Concepts, and today’s post will cover a new update Google has made to its algorithm, which will now show more results from a single domain on certain queries.

The new update to Google’s algorithm was announced by the company last Friday, August 20th, where they stated that for particular queries, users would now find it easier to find a large number of results from a single site. Normally in the past for these same queries, there would only be two results that would show, followed by results from other sites to give the user a variety to choose from. However, Google stated “For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, we’ll now show more results from the relevant site.” Let’s take a look at an example of what this new change looks like.

In this screen shot, we see an example of how popular search results used to display where a popular and relevant domain would hold the first two positions in search results, followed by other domains.

---- Help us help you! Please take 3 minutes to complete this confidential survey. ---

However, the new change allows the a relevant and popular domain to yield many more results on the first page, which in this case is CNN.com. This is because Google has determined if someone searches for CNN, they are much more likely to find what they are looking for from the cnn.com domain versus other sites, which now have been pushed to the 8th position and beyond. You can find similar results from typing searches in like “Apple iPod” and “ESPN NFL” as well.

So what are the pros and cons of this new change? Well, if you’re a site owner whose domain is now showing several results on the first page, you obviously benefit from greater visibility on the coveted first page of results. In addition, this added visibility also means better brand management as you are in control of the pages that users will see when searching for your brand or product.

A downside of the change would be if your site wasn’t the benefiting domain, which would mean your ranking would drop. Lets use an example of an Apple iPod retailer that was originally #5 until this change was made, and has subsequently fallen to the 2nd page in search results since Apple.com commands 7 of the top 10 rankings for the search term “Apple iPod.” This means users would now have to click to the second page of search results to find your site, which means you will receive far fewer clicks which most likely means lower sales.

Another con might come from the user’s perspective where they don’t have the same variety of search results from different domains they might have become accustomed to.

That’s all for this week’s edition of SEO Monday and I hope its been helpful for your business. If your website has been impacted by any change to Google’s algorithm or you’d like to find how it can improve further for SEO, please contact us to learn more about our Advanced SEO service and request an Advanced SEO Audit for your site.

We’d also like to remind you that if you have a question or idea you would like to see covered on Your Daily Concept, to please send us an email to blog@exclusiveconcepts.com! If selected, we will email you and let you know when the video will be posted. Thanks for watching and please tune in tomorrow for another edition of PPC Tuesday!