In the beginning, there were 10 results, and it was good. Then, came expanded site-links and Google's 7-result SERP. Around the middle of 2014, we started to hear reports of SERPs with odd numbers of organic results – 9, 8, 6, 5, and even 4 page-1 results. At first, these were sporadic and hard to replicate, but they quietly expanded. This is a recent 4-result SERP for "autism speaks":
By some counts, there are as many as 16 non-paid links on this page (not counting images), but by traditional SEO standards, there are only 4 true organic positions for which you can compete. So, what's going on here? Is it just random, or is there a method to Google's madness?
It's all in the news
For a couple of months, I just assumed these strange result counts were some kind of glitch. Then I noticed an unusual pattern. Last October, Google rolled out the "In The News" Update. This update expanded news results to many new sources, but it also seemed to change the pattern of when news results appear. This is 28 days of data from MozCast's Feature Graph (10K queries):
The presence of News results seemed to be cyclical, dipping early in the week and peaking later in the week. I don't follow News results closely, so it was just a curiosity at first, until I saw another bit of data. This is the average page-1 result count for that same period:
While the scale of the change was much smaller (please note that both graphs have a restricted Y-axis to make the effect more visible), the opposing shapes of the curves seemed like more than a coincidence. As News results increased, the average page-1 organic result count decreased.
It's a vertical, vertical world
Spot-checking various SERPs, I was able to confirm this effect. If page 1 had a News box, then the organic result count would be decreased by one (to either 9 results or 6, depending on the starting point). Here's a sample SERP (I've removed snippets to simplify the image) for "samsung galaxy tab":
This is a basic 10-result SERP, but when a News box comes into play, we're only left with 9 organic results. This raised the question – were other verticals having a similar impact? Digging deeper, I found that, in addition to News results, Image results and In-depth Articles also occupied one organic position. Remember the example at the top of the post? It's a brand query, resulting in a 7-result SERP, but it also has News results, Image results, and In-depth Articles. If we do the math: 7 - 1 - 1 - 1 = 4 results. It's not random at all.
In the interest of being more methodical, what if we looked at the average page-1 organic result across every combination of verticals in our data set? We'll stick with a starting point of 10 results, to keep the data clean. Here's a table with the average counts by vertical combination:
I've taken the average out to two decimal places just to be more transparent, but what we're seeing here is little more than a tiny bit of measurement error. Generally speaking, each instance of a vertical result type (as a whole, not individual links within these verticals) costs a 10-result SERP one organic ranking position. It's worth nothing that SERPs with all 3 verticals are pretty rare, but when they occur, each of those 3 verticals costs one position and one opportunity for you to rank on page 1.
It's always something
So, do the same rules apply to 7-result SERPs? Well, Google isn't a big fan of making my life easy, so it turns out this gets a bit more complicated. When 7-result SERPs originally launched, our data showed that they almost always came with expanded sitelinks in the #1 organic position. By "expanded sitelinks", I mean something like the following:
Sitelinks usually appear for queries that either have a strong brand connotation or at least a dominant interpretation. While we typically use 6-packs of expanded sitelinks as an example, actual counts can vary from 1 to 6. Originally, the presence of any sitelinks yielded a 7-result SERP. Now, it's gotten a bit more complicated, as shown by the table below:
Since each row of sitelinks can contain up to 2 links, the general logic seems to be that 1 row of sitelinks equates to 1 additional organic result. If you have 3 rows of sitelinks, then Google will remove 3 organic results from page 1.
Google's logic here seems to revolve around the actual display of information and length of the page. As they add some elements, they're going to subtract others. Since the physical display length of of most elements can vary quite a bit, the rules right now are pretty simplistic, but the core logic seems to be based on constraining the total number of results displayed on page 1.
It's time to rethink organic
All of this raises a difficult question – what is an organic result? As SEOs, we typically don't think of vertical results as "organic" by our fairly narrow definition, but they're much more organic than paid results or even Knowledge Graph. What's more, Google is starting to blur the lines with verticals.
For example, in the past couple of weeks, Google has redesigned the look of In-depth Articles twice. You might think "So what? It's just a design change," but take a closer look. At the end of March, Googled removed the "In-depth articles" header. Here's an example of the new design (for the query "jobs"):
While the thumbnail images and horizontal dividers still set these results apart somewhat, Google's intent seems to be to make them appear more organic. Keep in mind, too, that other, organic results use thumbnails as well (including videos and recipes).
Then, just a couple of weeks later (our systems detected this on the morning of April 8th), Google went much farther, removing the thumbnails and even the byline. Here's part of a screenshot for "Putin":
Can you spot the true organic results here? They're the first two – the rest of this screenshot is In-depth Articles. The only real clue, beside the count and source-code markers, is the horizontal divider on either end of the 3-pack. On mobile, even the dividers are gone, as every result is treated like a "card" (see below).
As an SEO, I'm still inclined to call these results "vertical" for two reasons: (1) historical precedent, and (2) these results play by different ranking rules. I think reason #2 is the more important one – In-depth Articles are currently dominated by a core set of big publishers, and the algorithm differs quite a bit from regular, organic results.
It's only the beginning...
You wanna get really crazy? Let's look at an entire SERP for "polar" on an Android device (Moto G). This result also includes In-depth Articles (warning: scrolling ahead):
Let's do the math. For starters, it's a branded result with expanded sitelinks, so we should have a 7-result page. Remember that those last 3 results are In-depth Articles, so we'll subtract 1, leaving us with what should be 6 results. See the "app pack" in the middle? That's an Android-specific vertical, and instead of counting the pack as just 1 result, Google is counting each link as a result. So, we're only left with 3 traditional organic results on this SERP, despite it being packed with information.
I strongly suspect this trend will continue, and it will probably expand. The definition of "organic" is blurring, and I think that all of these vertical results represent SEO opportunities that can't be ignored. If we're stuck in the mindset of only one "true" organic, then our opportunities are going to keep shrinking every day.
I can imagine that your post, Pete, is going to cause two opposite kinds of reactions.
The first will be the almost classic (and I may add so classic to start becoming pathetic) "blame you Google" one, with people shaking their fists.
The second, the most intelligent IMHO, will be similar to your final statement: Stop thinking to SERPs as a monolithic entity. I'm inclined toward this reaction, and were many see a stolen visibility spot, I see a new opportunity.
Sure, the SERPs aren't perfect and Google is not that "usability master" it pretends to be, but the more facets SERPs may have the more sophisticated we can be in our SEO strategy.
For instance:
I could continue listing all others verticals and related opportunities, but this should be a comment and not a "post into a post" :-)
How soon will Dr. Pete's post just recommend targeting page 2 of the SERP because Google will encompass all of page 1?
It looks like this was written in jest, but honestly, with Google putting answers in prominent spots I wonder how long it will take for users to get "Google Blindness" similar to "ad blindness" and just stop clicking on Google-centric returns in lieu of other results. It could happen...
Excellent point, jkeys1313. Sooner or later users will get wise to the way Google works and maybe even actively go for "Google Blindness" but Google in turn will come up with other ways to improve things for themselves. Things will keep interesting in any case.
I respectfully disagree with your premise. Google does extensive testing, and as a Google user myself, I actually frequently prefer Google's Knowledge Graph results, News results, etc. For example: my wife and I went somewhere this past weekend and wanted to check the weather. My wife went to Weather.com's mobile site on her phone and had to go through several pages (and a frustrating user experience) to get the answer she wanted. When she queried Google directly, she got the answer immediately (pulled in from Weather.com using Schema markup no less). It was a FAR better user experience than going to their website directly. I know there are instances where it isn't a better experience, but for the most part, I think Google is knocking it out of the park with their Knowledge Graph and other SERP innovations.
Does that give you an idea of why Google loves markup? It helps them to understand much better what the page is about so they can scrape the content and use it as their own. A practice that they strongly discourage other webmasters from doing.
I can't help but think Google will eventually do away with returning websites in SERPs, it'll just return info which has been marked up. It underlines the importance of regularly generating unique content, great for searchers, but it begs the question - where is it best to post content?
Yeah, I left out the new answer boxes, since they don't consume a ranking position, but now that they're coming from our sites, they definitely have an organic quality. Actually, it's interesting to note that, while they visually look different, the source-code markers are very, very similar to organic. I think Google views them as being more organic than traditional answer boxes.
I definitely agree that there is always opportunity and risk for almost every change. You have to be aware of the risk and mindful of the opportunity. It was funny to me that, when authorship went away (from a SERP display perspective), a bunch of people said "See, I told you so - glad I didn't waste my time on that." Meanwhile, the people who saw it as an opportunity early got a couple of years of CTR gains. I think we need to expand our perspectives.
I am with you, the changes are opportunities for several websites.
I am not that much against these google changes, when I usually do a search (private one, not a job based search) I only scroll down, when Adwords ar on Top (mostly because adwords are not that often optimized, seems like noone heard about landing pages - usually I get a link to the home-page and there is nothing what answers my question). So if a result has only 9 or 7 Results, but News or Images in a snippet, I would prefer that as google user.
The problem with bring PPC into sixths is not that no one has heard of landing pages, but PPC is hopw Google makes it money, and therefore a SERP without an ad is wasted opportunity for them. So they will do all they can to show an ad no matter how vaguely related. This combined with new advertisers bidding on broad terms with little to no negative keywords delivers the problem you describe above.
Like you said, it is a bit more than one reason, many advertisers bitting on "iPhone" but they only sell covers. Others just want the traffic right to there homepage and google wants to deliver me ads as much as possible.
Very interesting article, and I agree with what Gianluca has to say about how it can be an opportunity for different SEO strategies to make it on the first page.
However, for local service area businesses, the SERPs aren't seeing this kind of shake-up (yet). For searches like "chicago plumber" there is a 7-pack and 10 organic results. If your clients' target keywords aren't newsworthy, image focused, or related to recipes than most SERPs are still going to include 10 organic results.
Still, very nice breakdown. Very interesting to see how the number of organic results is impacted by sitelinks, news, etc.
You see other shake-ups in local, though - Pigeon sliced a lot of 7-packs down to 3-packs, "snack packs" are replacing regular local packs for competitive keywords in major markets (removing organic links entirely in favor of G+ listings), and mobile is showing even more disruption in local. The changes are different but local is going to see major disruption in the next 2-3 years.
Also worth noting that, in my data set of 10,000 competitive, commercial keywords, less than 20% have 10 blue links. These examples aren't the exception to the rule.
Indeed a good read but some 2 years late Id say Doc... Brand serps are naturally going to be smaller but still present opportunities for optimisation around said brand/ eRep... rather competitive/ keyword derived SERPs are what Id call a 'problem' in UK is localisation/ pidgeon as this has cut serps down, "oven spares" formally a ecommerce serp, but then localised... as such by your rules we see some 17 results on a page for localised serps... "London estate agents" thus we have essentially two opportunities in these - the lcoal ranks and the natural... so alas although you say space is tight, when hasnt it been? And now when you rank page 1 for your keywords you'll get more of the traffic...
We all know that about the fold results are where you see any real traffic/ easy(er) conversion thus on serps where google favours its own products I see a problem, "credit cards" - "mortgages" and so on - now in UK we are seeing google products at pos 1 - heck even "hotels" and so on - so where is the love here? As such it seems google are begin shot at by the ASA for favouring their own products within serps thus itll be interesting to see how legal matters affect just what they can display here in the UK...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32327324
It all depends on the niche and keywords.
Throw personalization and individual behavior into the mix and it gets even more interesting and challenging. I never search on anything Android related, but I do own both a Polar and a Garmin heart rate monitor, so my search results for Polar are a mixture of results for Polar USA, articles related to the environment, and the Coca-Cola Polar bear.
Good. I think that this SERP information increase the opportunities for many small bussines
The worst part about all this is just how fractured the search results are starting to look. I have tons of examples, similar to the ones you are showing, where it looks ridiculously choppy. I imagine Google has done a ton of testing for this and can support their decisions, but it's hard to see how users could like this more. I am finding it difficult to read and navigate.
I think part of the challenge, even with their culture of testing, is that mobile is driving design. So, they design things that work really well on mobile, but then they have to adapt those changes to desktop, which doesn't always work. Carousels are a great example - they make a lot of sense on mobile, but they're kind of clunky and counterintuitive on desktop (IMO).
From SERP exploration I've done, the local packs are a vertical that also typically adhere to the "subtract 1 organic result" method. Choppy indeed, but it's nice to know there's a method to Google's "madness."
That seems to fluctuate - I've seen traditional packs (not snack-packs or one-boxes) take up a position, but lately they don't seem to. Not sure why they don't carry that logic through consistently - a 3-pack is a pretty big entity, let alone a 7-pack.
There is a new job coming that is a natural evolution of the SEO. I'd call it just an SE - with the "E" standing for "Expert" instead of "Engine". The way I see it, there are SO many channels (and the list continues to expand) that businesses can connect with current and potential customers now, that we don't need to be an "SEO", we need to be search experts and search strategists skilled at understanding the myriad of channels and how to leverage them appropriately depending on goals, budgets, consumers, etc.
We've honestly had it easy for many years as many have been allowed to (mostly) focus on one platform in the search channel - Google - while truly skilled experts managing other channels such as social, have had to have in-depth knowledge of how multiple platforms work (often at least 2-3).
SEO's that can graduate their thinking to a more strategic role that not only can direct in-depth action for capitalizing on more traditional aspects of search, but understand how to help brands continue to strategically connect with customers at different points of their journey as they search across a variety of channels and platforms I believe can be extremely powerful.
Liked the post as always Pete.
It's obvious that Google is slowly expanding to two things:
1) More specific results in Google SERP. A user friendly kind of motive.
2) Bringing more of sitelinks, Ad copies (which generate ultimate revenue for them), News Sites (to pile up latest info if any related to topic you are searching for),
3) In-Depth articles: Deep content getting importance rather than shallow ones.
Mobile results would surely be more focused towards app installs and ads and the packs would reduce further. This would be more focused to make user journey easy through Google.
Maybe it seems that Organic will have a shrinking trend but never loose its importance.
I find this transformation a positive shift. It certainly gets my gears rolling in thinking about how content could become news worthy. PR has been a strong means of achieving backlinks, trust, brand and traffic for some time now. Google jumping on board to support related and relevant news helps to brings issues of top interest front and center. If search results trigger local services there may be less news worthy related content, but those that slip into the margin I'm sure will hold validity.
Google, their habitual unknown exercise revealed in your sagacious post, a great useful inference, thanks Dr. Pete. Google is bringing changes in their algorithms, and even in the knowledge graph as well, but they never release any notice under any umbrella of the edition like panda/penguin/hb/pigeon. This sort of pretty madness might provide a bit scope to misusage of SEO by the newbies as well. Still getting hope, changing means bringing betterment.
In the future I guess there will be one SERP design for mobile and another for desktop. And different results also. Because we are looking for different type of information on different devices.
Hi! Is there a resource for targeting the "In the News" section of SERP results? Is it well known which news sources Google uses to populate this section? I'd love to try and get my content featured in one of those publications and see if it would rank. If anyone has a resource to help target the "In The News" section please let me know :)
Very interesting seeing it laid out like this. One thing I think a lot of marketers are missing out on is linking other channels to the search results for mobile.
I noticed recently when I was travelling to London, I Google'd the hotel I was staying at to get the address and in the search results I got told the usual such as map results but also that I have an event coming up and I have emails about a stay at this hotel (this was added to my calender thanks to the email) which followed with check in and check out dates and times as well as other information which I can't remember/replicate now. If this is unique to travel, I don't know as I've never seen it before (would be handy to know if anyone does?), but if it's not I think Google expanding search this way has opened a wealth of opportunities for us. It's stops people being narrow minded of just search and opening them up to unified campaigns with other channels such as email.
Yeah, we're seeing a lot more of that extreme personalization, and it's probably going to tie into Google Now more as we move forward. That ecosystem is still pretty closed and also fairly small, so opportunities are limited, but we need to keep our eyes open.
I am a bit worried about the changes happening in the SERPS, both with Googles Knowledge Graph and the deep vertical elements which only seems to leave room for ads and a little bit of organic results.
The definition for "organic" is now expanding into earned social as well.
@Pete: Beautiful (and somehow scaring!) article! Thanks for sharing your analysis @Gianluca: "planning a long term strategy with the objective of making our site becoming one of them is very suggested" thats a great suggestion, and surely will bring organic traffic in a way or the other (fulfilling Google's desire for knowledge :) )
Hello Peter!
I think a really interesting article.
Before when you do a search on Google the only results that appeared were the text.
Today, that has changed. When we do a search results appear in text in a small part. The results of videos and pictures have come to loom large in the search results. Besides, these are divided into the paid and organic.
For several months we have seen that the search results are down and changed, as you said in the article.
It is no longer enough to your page text. Now it is also important videos, images etc. also.
A good strategy to emerge in the search results would try to gain visibility in different kinds of results.
We will have to see the trend of Google in this field.
I’ve been hearing about shrinking SERPs for a long time. But generally, from a user perspective, nothing has changed. From a marketer’s perspective, it does mean we have to share the space with news in some niches, but guess what? People are searching for news just as much as for products and how-to info. It all depends on the niche.
Has anyone heard of Bing? Maybe try Googling it? (lol) Oh wow, 6 organic results! (LOL). The "In The News" section shows the following very interesting article posted yesterday:
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/04/20/m...
Is this a sign that long-form, in-depth articles are going to be huge for regular rankings eventually? So much so that they'll simply be part of regular search results?
Possibly. When Google launched In-depth, they said that something like 10% of queries were for broad, ambiguous terms that they didn't know what to do with. In-depth was a way of giving people options, and I think this is a problem that won't go away for them. So, I'd expect a lot of evolution over the next couple of years.
Something I have noticed when using a mobile to do some searching is that I find it very hard to get to the results I want. I will usually just make a note of the search and when I get home do it again on the desktop.
I had kind of just thought it was a mobile thing (fiddly buttons and awkward to read text) but I think this highlights where Google is currently getting it wrong and making it harder for the user to get what they actually want.
My reaction at the moment is just to use Google on a desktop/laptop instead but maybe we will see another search engine do it better and pinch a little market share
funny now even a week after this post the face of this SERP has changed (images have been removed from indepth articles)
The second image shows that change - it happened while I was writing the post (but before the post was published).
I think Google is contentiously striving to make SERPS more user friendly and have different verticals presented to entertain users in a compact way. Although it does decrease the spots for organic results but it also provides new opportunity to SEOs in other verticals like: News/Apps/In-Depth Articles/Local Data. It is the time to use new opportunities and transform ourselves with the dynamic changes rather than thinking old school.
Google’s new expanded ad and site links are now reducing the number of organic search results displayed dynamically and dramatically. I usually find out about SERP changes by experiencing them and saying to myself, “hey, that’s neat”, or “why did you do that, I hate that!” In this case I’m divided. Lots of vertical space is going to the expanded site links which can be quite convenient if they happen to be what you’re looking for. The downside is, you probably aren’t going to see many organic results without doing a fair amount of scrolling or even switching to the second results page. It’s worse on Android than it is on desktops. On Android you have to factor in Google App Store results along with ads and expanded site links. Which means you might see three real results on the first page. To make things even worse, priority ads and sites are becoming harder to distinguish from organic results because the barriers between result categories has been intentionally minimized. This may have happened to make better use of space on the page, but if better is three organics, then we really have a much bigger problem.
Things are getting more and more complicated it seems. Luckily, most of the new stuff rolls out late in Denmark, so we can get some time to adapt and be prepared for it. Still doesn't make it a whole lot easier though.
Major changes in the algorithms and I fear that we will soon have more important news. Thanks for the info.
When Google first started, they were fairly well known for the "I'm feeling lucky" button. Oh, how we come full circle. One day soon they'll only return that first result and a "did we get it wrong?" button to go to page 2. Ah, SEO, I love you.
It seems after sometime we will hardly have any organic result. Can't imagine a SERPs result which will be occupied by all the paid and other vertical's results.
It's scary!!
Hi Dr Pete - we have also noticed this trend and the back and forth/indecision that Google seems to have with including thumbnails in their search results. This yo-yoing is also apparent with Google Adwords and the box that they are contained within - which in the UK seems to have disappeared altogether. For a number of our clients organic results on the first page have decreased due to both news articles, expanded sitelinks and images which is incredibly frustrating. We have been concentrating on both getting our own images displayed and also making sure that clients are considering more traditional PR so that they are featured in these in depth news articles (along with getting to be the top with expanded site links of course!).
If we go back in past we have seen similar changes before. Still there are thousands of ways to explore for SEO's and Google. Maybe someday someone will travel through Virgin Galactic and will be successful to get a link from space :P
Great read and a lot of things to think about (as always), Dr. Pete. Agreed, to maintain the traditional sentiments of organic is akin to Gene Wilder wanting to go back into the 'dark box' in Stir Crazy…"Just one more day!"
In thinking of what Gianluca says above re: taking opportunity, and recently attending a meet-up focused on Schema, I'm wondering if returning to some older content or 'evergreen content' and emulating that reserved for news articles (https://schema.org/NewsArticle) might be something worth exploring for some. Thanks.
Dr. Pete, do you think the trend is pointing in the direction of seeing search results with no organic listings? Obviously this wouldn't work for a majority of searches due to ambiguous intent. However, I could see a day when Google becomes so confident in certain answer boxes in their knowledge graphs that they don't even show any other results outside of the link to the site with the answer.
Do you think this is coming? For example, if Google sees that a certain search query that produces an answer box never results in click-throughs to the organic listings, will they consider just not showing those listings?
Yes, for one reason, and it's not just about small screens (mobile, smart-watches, etc.). Think about voice search. If you're using Google voice search or Siri or Cortana or an Amazon Echo, you need a concise answer. Every search provider on the planet wants to provide you with that, where possible, because a concise single answer can server every modality. I don't want my phone to read me a list of websites.
Very interesting. This clearly makes it much easier to manipulate the SERPs, if you know what you are doing.
I think this month is going to be a very interesting month for the way the SERPs look, to be honest they've moving in this direction for a long time, the most frustrating thing is the quality in the results isn't there like it used to be, I'm not sure offering variety of content is the same as offering a variety of sources.
I think one thing that google might be upto is to reduce the number of organic links on generic more wide keywords where they would show 4 - 7 max results where only the sites which have gain high authority would be showing up. Where as for the rest of the site the organic play would be more towards the long tails.
It is crazy what Google is doing to the SERP's. I agree with the first comment, it is tempting to become frustrated, but much more important is to broaden our horizons and react in the right way. It really comes down to embracing a complete online marketing strategy not trying to cheat the system.
I never really gave the "shrinking SERPs" a thought except for now. Its a good thing I stumbled upon this piece. Having read this content I agree that the trend adopted by Google will continue.
Google is known with "inconsistencies" when it comes to applying updates and changes. Some of these changes look complicated when in actually sense they should be simplified.
SEO professionals should have a rethink on what actually is organic ranking, and they must follow the "not -too" random tactics deployed by Google to improve search!
This comment was left in kingged.com where I found this article upvoted.
Google News is both an advantage and disadvantage for SEOs. You can get more traffic if Google consider your content as news else this could be a threat to your rankings and the click-through rate.
I agree with you. I'm working with SEO for four years and I've noticed that Google is changing now . We should be attentive. Thanks for sharing
Hi,
Amazing blog about Search Engine Result Page.I have confusion in SERP but after reading your this article i am totally undestand ,what is SERP and how it help to SEO.
Thank you for this article.
BY Anaya,
https://www.3d-architectural-rendering.com
Wow - even more opportunities!
Thanks Google :)
:O EVILL!!!
Solid post!
You inspired me to write another post on SERP. :)
The way Google is changing its SERP, we must keep a close eye on it. we must focus on long tail keywords.
in coming days we may see more changes in SERP.