Back in June, I wrote about what I called the “Bigfoot” Update, a major Google ranking fluctuation that seemed to be tied to SERP crowding. Put simply, fewer domains were getting more real estate in the Top 10. Since June, this trend only seems to be continuing. This is a graph of domain diversity from April 4, 2012 through last Thursday (August 16):
The percentage represents the density of unique subdomains across the entire data set (Top 10 rankings for 1,000 keywords) – the lower the domain diversity, the more crowding in the SERPs. The large drops are: (1) the original Penguin update and (2) the “Bigfoot” update. Crowding continued to worsen until (3), when a slight improvement occurred around 8/14.
The Incredible Shrinking SERPs
As I was digging into (3), I noticed that something else happened around that same time. There was a burst of chatter that people were seeing only 7 results on some SERPs. One of the benefits of the Mozcast data set is that I can go back and run new stats over historical Page 1 rankings. So, I set out to determine if this 7-result phenomenon was real, and if so, if it was new. This is a graph of Top 10 SERPs with less than 10 results since April 4:
While, historically, it seems there have been some SERPs with less than 10 results for a while, they ranged from 1-4% of the data set. In just two days, from about August 12-14, that number jumped to over 18%. Mozcast shows Page 1 SERPs with between 7-10 results, but almost the entire spike occurred in the 7-result pages. This is a graph of just the 7-result data:
SERPs with 7 results were an anomaly prior to 8/13, with the system tracking a maximum of one (0. 1%) on any given day. On 8/13, that number jumped to 10.7% and then, the following day, to 18.3%. Almost one-fifth of SERPs tracked by our data now have 7 results.
“George Is Getting Upset!”
Nobody likes shrinkage, and we naturally get upset when someone messes around with our familiar, 10-result page. So, what’s happening here? Here’s a sample SERP, for “pc tools”, with numbered results (1-7):
You’ll notice two things right away: (1) “PC Tools” is a brand, and (2) the #1 result has expanded site-links. Not every SERP affected appears to be branded, though – a search for “krill” (the #1 result is a Wikipedia entry for the crustacean) also returns 7 results, for example.
To maintain the integrity of the Mozcast crawl, I can’t do a public data dump of all of the affected keywords we measured, but spot-checking them reveals expanded site-links in almost all observable cases. While not all keyword phrases were branded, site-links and branded queries are naturally correlated.
“No! Not Six! I Said Seven!”
Sorry, I just wanted an excuse to use this movie clip. While the vast majority of the shrunken SERPs have 7 results, a couple of 6-result pages snuck into the mix. This is a screenshot from a Google result for “pictures of cats”:
Here, the standard, organic results are preceded by a mega-block of image results. Like the expanded site-links, I can only guess that these are being treated as multiple pieces of SERP “real estate”. In every case, the first result or result-block appears to be counting as more than one position.
What’s the Crowding Connection?
It’s tough to say if the slight decrease in crowding (increase in diversity) is directly related to the explosion in 7-result SERPs. My best guess is that, since many of the 7-result SERPs are branded and branded results seem to have more crowding (anecdotally, at least), cutting them short of a full 10 improved overall diversity slightly. In other words if a 10-result SERP was crowded and three got lopped off, then the remaining 10-result SERPs are counting more and pushing diversity back up a bit. It’s impossible to say if this was intentional or just a side-effect.
Why Was “Flux” Relatively Normal?
If you follow the Google weather on Mozcast, you may be wondering why temperatures were just slightly above average on the two days when SERP shrinkage rolled out. Digging into the data, it appears that the baseline flux for those two days was relatively low. Without the 7-result shift, temperatures on 8/13 would've been closer to 62°F. Combined with the two-day roll-out (split almost evenly across the two days), the introduction of the 7-result pages snuck just below the radar. It's hard to say whether the two-day roll-out was intentional or simply an artifact of our 24-hour data collection.
What Can You Do About It?
In a word: nothing. This isn't an SEO-related change, where an on-page or link-profile tweak might change your SERP back to 10 results. This is an algorithmic volume knob Google can turn and we can't, right or wrong. My best advice is to spot-check the SERPs for your main keywords. Don't just rely on rank-tracking tools - they may tell you that you're in the #8-#10 spot, but they won't tell you whether your SERP cut off after #7. If you're sitting on a lot of #8 keywords, you may find yourself suddenly on Page 2. If that's the case, it could be worth the effort to get back up into the Top 7, especially if the cost of getting from #8 to #7 is relatively low. Of course, this is a recent development, and it's likely Google is testing the waters (and could make a course-correction). My best advice is to pay attention - as part of your regular reporting process, make sure you look at SERPs in the wild, and see what you're up against.
SERP crowding has been getting worse so I'm glad SEOmoz are highlighting the issue.
What I can't understand is why Google has yet to create a rule in the algorithm that says only show one domain in any given ten SERPs. In many niches, you won't get any domain diversity unless you click on the PPC ads.
By limiting SERP domain choice, is Google driving more users to click ads?
There was a time when I strongly suspect they had that rule in place. Then, they loosened it up. Then, they introduced expanded site-links and tightened it again. That made sense - expanded site-links gave the #1 spot more real estate, so that domain didn't need multiple listing. Then, for some reason, they started awarding multiple listings to multiple domains. I honestly have no idea why - I'm finding it hard to see how less diversity helps search quality.
They must be doing their own multivariate testing
Dumb question? If somebody is searching for a brand why would it do anything other than improve their search experience to show more results from the brand's main domain(s)? To do otherwise would be to knowingly serve them what they didn't order.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable question. The argument seems to be that for "navigational" searches or searches with clear brand intent, giving people less results gives them less to parse through and speeds up the page. So, if Google feels that the 7 results server 98% (I'm making that number up) of searchers, than 7 is better than 10.
Honestly, I think Google is reaching a point where they're actually too data driven. They can measure and see that reducing a SERP to 7 results shaves off 11 milliseconds and this results in 0.02% less bounce rate (making these numbers up, again). At the scale of Google's data, that difference could easily be statistically significant. The problem is - does significant mean meaningful? What if that 0.02% "savings" is at the cost of some other variable that they aren't measuring? I'm not confident in "big data" alone to answer these questions.
Could You please suggest the ways to reduce the time of loading the page
https://zangmate.com
Google will tell you it's to benefit the searcher with sites that they trust and want to see. The question is.. does it improve searcher experience or not? How can we test to see if users' experiences have improved or declines with lower domain diversity? I'm inclined to say that more domains = more choices = better experience.. but as an SEO, I'm biased.
I like your "increased PPC revenue" posit - their Q2 2012 PPC earnings increased by 42% which is a HUGE jump.. possibly caused by worse organic results.
These 7 result pages again insist that Google wants to tell us that it is not charitable trust. Google is commercial company and wants that more and more people draw towards paid listing. The second reason that force me to beieve this is, Google has implemented cached screen shots for only organic result. They should have implemented this for PPC listing. But if they do this, it will lead to less clicks simply.
So what we need to do is just get ready for more shrinkage might be up to 5!
Seriously? Nobody is going to make a George Castanza joke? Maybe the Google pool is just super cold!
Am I being dense or would this point to keyword rich domains having an advantage again?
It looks like the advice to "become a brand" is getting to be the only way. Gives me something to think about as I build out my own sites.
My metrics are still a bit crude, but it looks like exact-match domains have actually lost influence over the past 4 months, and took a solid dip after the Penguin update. "Keyword rich" and partial-match are a bit harder to measure, unfortunately.
I think it indicates that strong brand signals are becoming more important. I don't think it's necessary to have a "big" brand to compete...but a strong brand. Like Pete mentioned in the post, PC Tools is a brand more than it is an exact match domain.
It was cold!
YES!! I love these kinds of posts on SEOmoz! The research and data publishing you guys have been consistently doing is very valuable to this community.
I wonder if the length of the page is a reason for the 7-SERP? To back up Nick's thought of it being more for aesthetics and user experience than for anything else.
Yea, Pete. It's a very interesting analysis, but Google's behavior is quite inadequate recently. Sometimes Google makes me disappointed...
Fascinating. This makes it much easier for a brand to control their SERP...if they have a branded Facebook page, Twitter, etc, they can fill most, if not all, of the SERP and crowd out competing links.
I think this also points to the importance of PPC ads...more and more of the real estate on the SERPs is paid space.
Not so much importance of PPC as google deciding it wants to screw some more dosh out of everyone who wants to be found. Who says Google organic and google paid are separate... Matt Cutts? ;-)
I just can't accept this change in Google's SERPs. I've seen so many examples of brand terms having more organic choice than generic, which means my clients have to bid on their brand to push competitors down the SERPs and bid aggressively on generic because their old position 2 is now 10+.
How are Google shares going since this? I imagine they've climbed somewhat since this change.
It makes me feel sick that they're doing such a blatant manipulation of generic searches and restricting results to users. Honestly, all I can say is f%$k Google.
Thank you for this informative post, DrPete.
In the past few months I have observed google reducing the number of sites that are visible in the top ten in certain situations. Sites that previously had two listings in the top ten now have their top listing in the top ten and their second listing demoted to position #17. This has happened to me on a number of high value queries. The second listings are not demoted to #16 but exactly to position #17 - and they stick there like glue with almost no flux.
That's really interesting - unfortunately, my data set only covers the Top 10, so I can't measure that. I'd love to see more data on it, though. I'm having a hard time sorting out the rhyme and reason of why domain diversity seems to be getting worse - in some cases, it seems like a side-effect of other changes.
First, obviously we'll have to wait and see if this is a long-term change. If it is, I agree with the commenter who said this shows how important PPC ads can be. If the SERP crowding continues, more and more people are going to look to the paid space for their answers. Google has an incentive to do this.
Very interesting development of the 7 rank system. Is Google going for more paid ads or do they really just believe that showing only 7 results with the first result having expanded links as a more effective means of displaying what people want. A lot of people claim that the 7 results on SERPs can only be found when searching for a brand. Perhaps Google has gotten to the point where it wants to lock in brands and provide the fastest access to them through the sub-links under the first result.
Think about it, what would be the benefit to Google to bring someone to a knockoff brand page when clearly the consumer was searching for the brand in the first place? For me it seems like less of an issue of generating more paid clicks and more of an issue of securing the best search engine service overall to compete with Bing and other search engines.
Just because Google is profit driven doesn't necessarily imply they changed their entire search engine algorithm to minutely increase the pay-per-click advertising space on each page, considering the fact that 7 result SERPs only surface when there is a general lack of diversity for the brand anyway. Maybe changing to a 7 result system is Google's way of claiming, "this is the end-all best result for your search, if you were looking for something different please click through to the next page!" Having the best product will ensure Google continued profit and growth. I believe this factors in much more heavily than Google trying to nickel and dime consumers by increasing the space of pay-per-click ads relative to the number of results displayed.
Yeah, I tend to agree that this particular change isn't about paid search. I think they're trying to balance expanded site-links and other alternative listings against the traditional 10-result SERP. I'm not clear on why they chose this particular solution, though - hopefully, it's something they'll speak up about, since it's going to become more and more obvious to searchers who are used to 10 results.
I agree too. Intuitively, I don't feel this is about paid search. That's always the first response of the cynics.
Just as a brief note, it seems that in cases where the top result has sitelinks there is a small effect. Often the sitelinks result would appear in reports to be two or even three results deep (that is, the site in second place on the page would be seen by ranking trackers as being in third or even fourth place). In all instances that I have data for that second placed site is now reporting as second placed, suggesting the 'additional' results for the sitelinked result (that presumably were absorbed into the sitelinks) are no longer present.
Yeah, it seems like Google has gradually changed how they tag site-links in the code. Now, they're really stand-alone. Local is still a mess that way. If you see an integrated 7-pack, sometimes they're "pure" local and sometimes a couple results are tagged (in the source code) as organic results. Crawling them is a mess.
I guess the solution is to work harder to try to get sitelinks fir our own sites. We really are in unchartered waters these days
This very unusual. I've noticed that some SERPs had less results than usualy but I thought it was due to my browser or OS. You make a good point about saturation on SERPs but I don't think reducing the number of results to 7 will solve the problem. If anything it will make things worse.
Classic..." No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel. "
Anyway that aside seems big foot strikes again with some interesting knock on affects for us all....lucky 7.
I did a manual check on my top 200 keywords. The new 7-organic-result SERP was showing up on pages with organic sitelinks for 100% of the keywords that i tested. i posted an article with my thoughts about this issue - https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/08/21/new-google-serp
Actually i've been seeing dozens (possibly hundreds) of 5-organic-result SERPs on navigational/branded searches with organic sitelinks. Has anyone else been seeing this? https://twitter.com/larrykim/status/237784788344389632/photo/1
Thanks for the analysis. While I had noticed some "oddities" here and there, I hadn't taken the time yet to dive in, or in this case, to simply count the results.
Hopefully this further encourages the use of secondary metrics, such as traffic by keyword or page. Sure, it's a bit more involved and you may not want or even be able to monitor across a whole keyword portfolio, but at least on critical terms, it provides a back up (and arguably more important metric anyway) data point to help alert to changes like this.
So now when you are consistently holding steady in one of these spots and traffic suddenly changes on a key phrase relative to the rest of the site, you know it is something to look into.
Also important to keep in mind that results pulled from--ah hem--ranking tools may pull them differently, such as 100 results per page, which may also impact ordering versus a default 10 per page, so it's always good to periodically spot check manually.
Yeah, that struck me, too - I designed Mozcast to look specifically at the Top 10, which has some pros and cons. What's interesting is that, since many ranking tools look at the top 100 all at once (to reduce the number of times they hit Google), this change isn't being reflected in a lot of our day-to-day data. Meanwhile, most human visitors still look at a 10-result page.
Great post Dr. Pete! Love reading into your insight as they come to reality. Lots to think about!
I don't have the number of websites at my disposal to do this... But I'd love to see if someone come up with a study of a significant number of SERPs with traffic affecting results 8-10.
Would be a nice comparison to see before and afters. Plus it would put some cool clarification on the CTRs of the lower results!
I wonder what niches are seeing the reduced SERPs the most. I double checked "pc tools" and also got only 7 results. But "computer tools" still lists all 10, plus shopping results and image results. Has anyone seen any particular relationship between what you're searching for and how many results are getting pulled?
Just ran a couple or searches on Google South Africa. Most return 10, "home automation" returned 11.
Does this only occur on brand searches and really popular keywords or is it becoming a normal thing depending on the result that Google returns?
Well, I don't really agree with this article.
When i count the number of results lines in your screenshots :
https://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/serp-crowding-5.gif
and
https://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/serp-crowding-4.gif
I can clearly see 10 results lines in both.
For the cats, each line of picrtures from Google image is a result.
In the second screenshot, each site link result line is a result.
In both cases, it makes 10 lines.
No ?
The 7-result pages seem to occur whether listing #1 has 3 lines of site-links or even just 1 or 2 lines of site-links. Your logic makes sense, but I'm seeing exceptions to that rule.
There are also code markers that reflect what Google considers to be an organic result, and those markers don't appear in the site-links or image results. This appears to be a hard-coded exception, in some sense.
Stepping back from the SEO side of things, I actually found this /really/ annoying when I was searching prior to reading this, as I found short pages covered in youtube videos... With more videos with each page.
Can't say I'm a fan of this move, the results have degraded to looking spammy by design when trying to search in certain niches.
Dr. Pete you are great, most of the changes you notice first, last time tabbed results and this time SERP Crowding & Shrinkage. Really great!! Thanks for sharing it...
I think Google has lost the plot. Besides the display issues relevance is starting to drift. They had better get organised soon or someone like Facebook will come out with a superior search engine.
Just googled iPad and only 4 results appeared. Shrinkage does seem to be linked to branded searches.
https://www.google.com/search?q=crustacean&sugexp=chrome,mod=18&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=ipad&oq=ipad&gs_l=serp.3..0l4.12736.13040.6.13092.4.4.0.0.0.0.176.334.0j2.2.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.6xpPHPx2X5Q&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=279f0a5cecb4a65a&biw=1198&bih=644
Nice and interesting post..
but I agree with xoffie
Nice post. I've been observing this over the past few weeks - and the numbers aren't surprising.
Part of Google's ongoing siege of the SERPs :)
Im glad someone brought up this topic. At this point the best that we can do momentarily is to look closely with the SERPs since we cant do anything about this as it is not an SEO related problem. I think this issue is part of the dynamic change. Lets just hope for the best.
I imagine with only seven listings on a page, the distribution of clicks changes too (the search traffic divided up by few players). Nice if you make the cut...
This is particularly pronounced in the travel industry, and if I were a skeptic, I'm quite sure 7 tripadvisor results would force a person onto the paid Ads, or even.... Page 2... or hopefully, a better search engine!
Can I haz 10 blue links back? ;-)
I've got screenshots showing domains with 8-10 results on the same page of Google SERPS. p2, p3 etc
I read a post recently about preferential ratings and believe Google have their favorites that can do no wrong.
I've seen high authority sites in my niche rank for keywords that aren't related to the query.
Example: How to update a plugin manually.
WPBeginner.com is ranking page 4 with content about How to update url's when moving your wordpress site which has nothing to do with the query.
High DA sites with a strong brand are crowding SERPS.
If Google knew what they are doing, they wouldn't need to mkake such wild changes in the algo all the time. Its not about spam, its about preferential rankings for their favorite sites.
This is an interesting situation because most of us know that your ranking isn't the be all and end all of attracting good converting traffic, but at the same extent, in many niches, your rank will lead to many converting organic leads. That being said, for those people who focus on rankings, this could get scary, having previously been in position 8, 9 or 10 would mean that you're now on Page 2 .. any SEO would agree that there is a BIG difference. I can sense a lot of SEOs shaking in their boots.
I must admit, with Google's earnings increasing, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth to think that perhaps this is to create more focus on AdWords blocks, but perhaps that's unfair of me.
What's also interesting is that here in South Africa, the 7 results aren't appearing at all, this will only hit us in a few weeks.. haha.
Nice and interesting post.. thnkz Pete..
Try a search for "mortgages leeds" in google.co.uk...
Just an example, as Patrick Altoft tweeted this to Matt Cutts this morning:
https://twitter.com/patrickaltoft/status/238543095552167937
This sucks and is just another example of Google pulling the rug out from underneath us marketers. Bing and Yahoo actually show about 50% more SERP's at this point, thereby making them about equal likelihood of getting clicked on since they only have about 30% of the search share. That being said, how do you specifically work to improve your search ranking in Yahoo or Bing?
They appear to be testing replacing organic results with images, videos, etc, rather than just adding video/image results to the page and leaving 10 blue links. If you note in your example above there are 4 rows of images replacing 4 blue links. I'm seeing that quite a bit, particularly on second pages of results.
Domain diversity for one of our primary key words has had the top 2 companies take up the top 4 results. #1, #2 are company X and #3, #4 are company Y. We are between #4 and #6, depending on what they domain diveristy is for that Search (scope = US) and a third competitor who is "skipping rope" with us. The diversityin the SEPS for this particular non-branded key phrase changes multiple times/day in this very competitive niche. I don't understand why 2 SERPs each are given to the #1, #3 domains, one for domain root and one for a page at least once removed from home. What's the benefit to the user especially for non-branded searches? I am confident that diversity will come back, at least for non-branded terms to maintain a positive user experience.
Of course the 7 pack is not always the case and depends on where you search from. Think it is mainly in US at the moment.
Good point - our data is entirely US-based currently. I haven't heard whether this is hitting our international friends yet.
Hi Dr Pete,
I have tested the 7-pack from Canada and pretty much all brands display 7 results only in Google.ca.
That said, I do not necessarily see Google ads on the pages but it does display the expanded site links for the #1 spot.
It seems to be international now... well, at least in North America.
Thank you for your amazing post!
I see a similar pattern on Google.co.in as well.
Nice post!
Seeing this a lot on google.co.uk. Searches for brands like "bbc", "persil", "amazon" all have 7 packs. Smaller brands I'm working with also getting 7 packs (Is this a way to check if you are being recognised as a brand?)
Getting 7 results in Israel, searches for big important brands like seomoz :-)
Pete, why wouldn't Google limit 1st page to 1 per domain? It just seems so obvious from every perspective (especially with expanded site-links).
Been trying to look for region-based directories on google.co.uk, but I've been seeing only the same 6 or 7 sites for 30+ pages before I just give up looking. It's definitely been getting worse in the past 3-4 weeks.
Am seeing the 7 pack results here also in South Africa (.co.za) . The SERP crowding issue in my 'niche' which is travel has been turning up in SERPS for quite a while now. I really dont see how this benefits the user but for the website that is crowding the results its great news. In my opinion it is just driving sites to go down the 'Google Ads' route.
It is affecting us now here in the Philippines.
Cool post, certainly worth a read - began noticing it in the gambling section about two weeks ago - on and off daily. I wouldn't be surprised if it was used as the lab-rat. It's interesting that you haven't really mentioned anything regarding the ever increasing love for large brands, and the constant hammering of small business/affiliate owners. They are destroying small companies.
It's the same with links too, a larger brand will not only attract links and be as natural as they can - but they also get away with the dodgy tactics because their backlink profile can handle it.
So, Pete, in your findings, did you find that if you're ranked #1, you get the extra links and description? Or has anyone ranked 2-7 been given that benefit, too?
I've never seen expanded site-links on a listing other than the #1 spot, but I don't have that historical data, unfortunately. I am seeing multiple domains getting more than one spot in the Top 10, though - you don't have to be the #1 spot to get listed more than once.
I just checked the SERPS for my business name (Jeff Downer Bail Bonds). I am embarrassed to say I had not noticed seven result.
I only mention this because no ads whatsoever appeared on the search results page. I find this curious, since I cannot think of any competitors that don't use "bail bonds" (or a close variation) as a keyword or part of their brand.
I just checked mine too, and you are right no ads at all. I got the 7 SERP. Interesting. I guess I like it for my own site, but not for the sites I'm tracking down.
Thanks Dr. Pete awesome post - any idea if the SEOMoz keyword difficulty tool will be updated to reflect this?
It's an interesting thought - the Mozcast data isn't tied into our other tools (or infrastructure) yet, but it's something we'll think about longer-term. One trick will be to just wait and see if this changes lasts. We've had the 7-result SERPs for a few days now, but Google could decide to reverse it. Right now, I'd consider the situation unstable, for lack of a better word.
Pete,
Great analysis -
Could this be something to do with the pixel length of the SERP's seeing as they have recently changed the page titles to be based on pixel length?
Russ
@therustybear
A couple of people asked that on Twitter - it's an interesting idea, but I don't think so in this case. Almost all of the new pages are 7-result SERPs, even if the #1 listing has 1, 2, or 3 rows of expanded site-links. So, I don't think it's the physical page length or anything quite that complex yet. That's just my gut feeling, though - I don't have a good way to measure it right now.
Many thanks for the analysis, Dr. Pete.
I hadn't noticed the change until Rhea Drysdale tweeted about it, and sure enough, when I checked a few of our brand terms, there we were, sitting at the top of 7 result SERPs.
I've since checked a fair few brand+keyword searches, and for us, as always, the further you get away from a pure brand name search (i.e. with 2/3 word keyphrases appended, rather than a single keyword), the less likely you are to get expanded sitelinks, so the less likley you are to see a 7 result SERP.
For a big box/big brand competitor of ours, as expected, the effect is much more sticky.
As you point out, it feels as though Google are now giving up multiple SERP spots to expanded site links and other extras, depending on how much screen real estate they occupy.
edit: spelling
I just checked for our branded search ("inchoo") and indeed it's a 7 results SERP. The same is true for several of my clients branded keywords. Expanded sitelinks present.
With 100 results per page you brand is 1st and the next 12 results are from twitter.
Lately I see results like that for a number of searches and it's annoying.
What good does it do to get 2 domains total in the first 10-20 results.
Once again Pete, an excellent and timely post.
If, as you mention in "What's the crowding connection?", the result is more diversity, it may or may not be a good thing (perspective is key here). We noticed recently that clients with sometimes two or three pages on a single keyword in the SERPs were all of a sudden...with one. Your info seems to suggest there could be some type of algorithmic attention to that type of occurrence.
It will be interesting to watch given that with site links, the real estate is shrinking for some.
Thank you so much for this post. I don't know how I missed the initial "Big Foot" post, but I did, and I've been panicking ever since our SERPs began their slow decline in the first week of June. Bittersweet - I'm not crazy, but there's also not much to be done about it.
In Google Australia, krill gives 10 results, plus AdWords at the bottom as well as top and side. PC Tools and other brands gives 7 results. "NAB" (a big bank here) gives 8 results if you count the chunk of Places.
Great post Dr. Pete. Less page one real estate = more value for SEO.
Interested to see the drop in traffic for major keywords ranked #8-10.
Great analysis ! I had noticed an increasing number of page 1s with only 7 results but thought it was just a fluke. Your data shows that that is clearly not the case.
What is the benefit to users here? Not often you hear people asking for less information from less sources is it?!
As with every change from Google in the last 2 years, the benefit to Google is very clear - but the benefit to users remains elusive.
Isnt, just pushing towards Google's own products
I continue to be confused by these reports of a handful of domains dominating pages 1 and 2. That's simply not what I'm seeing for the high-competition e-commerce keywords in my industry. Are there commonalities for the keywords where this is happening? Can anyone give me some examples?
Awesome post with great information as always Dr. Pete! Sure enough, I spot checked several important terms for us:
Countryman microphones
Shure microphones
Yamaha Mixers
All three only had 7 results on page 1. All three are major brands and all three liste the brand with expanded results first on the list, reinforcing everything you said. Pretty eye-opening stuff.
uh... Google always changing things!! Does this really benefit the user to have less information (results) for people doing searches?
great post and good data. we had done some analysis last month of increasing SERP space being allotted to paid search, i didn't think to analyze if space for organic search space was shrinking in absolute terms. wow. great catch.
Hi Pete: Let's just say one of the keywords we monitor for our clients was badly affected (how badly you ask? 30+ of the top 50 listings were taken by one competitor, and the other 10+ were taken by the second one, leaving the rest to fight for 5 to 7 listing positions in top 50), and our ranking was all over the place - one minute could be at 20+, next minute 70+, every hour you check, the ranking shifted.
But for the last few days, I noticed the ranking for our website has stabilized, now it sits at 15 - 17th place for more than few days.
Surely the decline of diversity is nothing but the bad news for searchers, and against the fundamentals of Google - to provide better search results.
Why I don't see no major media coverage of this? Why no one is questioning Google publicly? Danny Sullivan and his SearchEngineLand hasn't mentioned it(at least I've not seen it). Certainly this is a BIGGER deal than all those zoo animals(I mean Pandas, Penguins)? I hope Google isn't paying to silence them just as they did in the lawsuit with Oracle to pay influencers to argue for their case, that'd be a sad story for the industry.
Since my data only covers the Top 10, I haven't seen anything that extreme. I completely agree - how is having the first 40 results come from two domains of value to search users? I just can't see the argument.
I don't think there's any sort of collusion going on with news sources. The algorithm has been changing a lot lately, and we don't have great data sometimes. Somebody like Danny might hear chatter that results look more crowded (less diverse), but it's hard to interpret those anecdotes. That's why I'm trying to run more of this data - so that the industry can see that these aren't just isolated examples. These are significant, long-term changes.
Hey RobotSEO:
We had a post up today about this. We had the first report of this come in on August 16 (last Thursday) as you can see in the post.
I'd been traveling all week, at that point, and I think I spent most of Thursday digging out. I think we also weren't sure how wide-spread it was, yet. It was definitely on the radar.
I was off on Friday and the weekend, it being both summer (so I'm trying to take time off) and the weekend (see also trying to take time off, have a life, it's the weekend).
When I came in this morning, we had another report of it come in, plus I saw Dr. Pete's post, so I dived in with my own write-up, finally having the time and a bit more evidence to backup.
In terms of the 7 results, that's new, so it's hard for us to have covered that before. In terms of the site clustering, you should see my post. I've complained about this since 2006, and we've certainly covered it plenty.
Hi Danny:
It's good to see you respond here. Didn't know you were on the road, I knew my tone was a bit provocative, apologies. but I do feel this is something much more serious than zoo animals, or any other updates so far.
I don't mind how tough Google's algorithm changes make our job to be, as long as it's making the search results better. But this change has completely shattered my faith in Google to deliver high quality results, and I can't think of one single excuse for Google to make such change(BigFoot), and can't stop but think Google is getting more evil.
By the way, in my case, the keyword I am monitoring is not a branded one, it's a generic product category name, like "sports cars", or "handbags"(can't reveal the actual keyword for obvious reasons). If it were a branded keyword, like "PC tools", I sort of understand the brand domination. But definitely not a general keyword.
I hope you will continue to watch this, because I for one am already seeing a lot more of these 7-packs on brands just since Friday.
As of this morning, it's still hovering around 18% of SERPs with <10 results (peaked at 18.8%). This post is a bit of a teaser - I'm working on a set of top-view metrics that are going to be rolled out on Mozcast (with 30-day histories, most likely). Domain Diversity and SERP "Shrinkage" will probably be two of those metrics. I'm hoping they will roll out in the first half of September.
Yeah, Pete you are absolute correct
Hi Pete,
I refer mainly to the new 7 result pages. I havn't been aware of that until now!
But it was easy to find numerous of them. They do really "only" show up if I search for brands and if they appear with site-links (at least what I spotted during my searches right now).
As the brand itself is of course ranking n°1 I guess Google is not concerned about the lost #8 to #10 rankings any more. Those are "only" pages/hubs which (try to) rank with different brands/companies, what of course is not the best search results for the searchers itself.
Regarding the density of unique domains on the serps - I really hope that they don't stuck on that and change that issue as soon as possible.
Dr Pete. Thanks for doing this. You are the best :)
I am sure the conspiracy theorists who think Google is trying to force more Adwords clicks will be crying about this. But to me, it just looks like the 7 SERP may be just an aesthetic decision so the results that have a 6 pack, the Places pack or image grid will take up the same amount of real estate as the traditional 10 SERP.
Nick - doesn't a reduction of organic listings by 30% on ~1/5th of SERPs imply more clicks to the paid ads? if it's just an aesthetic decision, why would they roll it out now? (the 6-pack has been around for a while). Is this really a conspiracy theory? It seems pretty obvious to me...
Really are people that naive or dumb? Or just hypocrite?
By 2012 you should've very well know what Google is doing:
It's classical and most of all, expectable censorship on the internet.
And like any censorship scheme , it's happening little by little but it has been clearly happening for years.
There is no doubt by 2015, Google results will be completely filtered to only show convenient results from major news outlet, blogs, stores and other official websites while the rest might not even be searchable.