Google engineers rolled out an update to their search engine algorithm earlier this month aimed at increasing the diversity of websites that show up in the search results.
The new update, termed the “Diversity” update, is aimed at improving the odds that smaller websites have of appearing in the results pages.
Google will now limit the number of times a domain can appear in a single search result. There were cases previously where a large authority site would simply dominate and own most of the first page results for a specific search term. This won't necessarily be the case anymore which is good news for small business owners competing with big box stores and other massive sites.
Have you ever done a search and gotten many listings all from the same site in the top results? We've heard your feedback about this and wanting more variety. A new change now launching in Google Search is designed to provide more site diversity in our results….
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) June 6, 2019
The popular SEO and content marketing blog, Searchmetrics, recently released their study into the effectiveness of the diversity update.
Based on their observations, their has been a decided uptrend in more diverse search results post-update. Now, 52.3% of search results will return ten unique domains within the top 10 rankings. This number is up from 47.9 pre-update so the effect is obvious.
For brand name searches, multiple results from one domain are still predominant indicating Google hasn't forgone relevancy simply for the sake of diversity.
Another takeaway is that transactional searches (think ecommerce) tend to be more diverse than informational search queries.
As more data rolls in, we'll continue to monitor and update this article with any relevant information.
