When it comes to successful keyword strategy, there are several unique pieces of content and web pages that you can create with a single keyword query. This would help your website’s authority online and then slowly move its way up for the more competitive core keywords. From a marketing perspective, stepping back and thinking about the user can feel like limiting a searcher’s options to explore the topic entirely.
For this reason, Google has now announced a new site diversity change which limits the number of domains showing up on a page for a given query. This update was first shared on Google’s Search Liaison Twitter account on June 3rd. Despite the timing, this site diversity change could not be affiliated with Google’s June 2019 core update. Though there are a few important factors that site owners, webmasters and SEO professionals should know about how this would affect their website.
What Do We Already Know About Google’s Site Diversity Change
Though the announcement comes by the way of a brief series of tweets, the message is jam-packed with crucial information to help marketers understand the scope and impact the change.
Now we break it down tweet by tweet here to get to the bottom of it and what it may mean in the coming times:
#Goal 1: Google Plans to Promote Diversity Within Search Results
Though this change came from the feedback of wanting more variety and diversity within the search listings. The change is made not for the penalizing of sites that optimizes multiple assets for the same keyword, but rather, to give users more variety and options in the search queries.
#Goal 2: Google Hopes to Limit Search Listings to No More Than Two Per Domain – With Exceptions
Generally, the diversity change would limit search listings from the same website to show no more than two pages, although that’s the general rule. Google didn’t go into the details on what examples would be considered as a ‘relevant’ in the scenarios. We can assume from the same that Google is referring to situations where the user would find the multi-page answers from the same domain helpful to their search experience. If you’ve had the experience in job searching and see multiple postings from Indeed, the user’s intent without being overbearing. It’s important to note that the limitation of two per domain exclusively refers to organic search listings and doesn’t extend to Google’s other features.
#Goal 3: Subdomains Would Be Evaluated on a Case-By-Case
As Google states that if you have subdomains, the general expectation should be that they would be treated as a part of the main domain. This means that the limit would apply your main domain and your subdomain’s pages together. However, this depends on if Google thinks that the subdomain pages are relevant enough to show multiple times along with the main domain. It would help Google to treat them as separate within search results.
#Goal 4: This is Not an Algorithm Change and Would Not Directly Affect the Site’s Ranking
This shift as a change can occur as an update which is not to cause any confusion with the June 2019’s core update that occurred earlier this month. Here update refers to changes to Google’s algorithm that directly have an effect on how Google evaluates pages. In this case, it is referred to how Google displays pages rather than changes influencing how well a webpage should rank. Though these changes should not affect how well your overall site ranks on Google, it could potentially impact the traffic.
Now the most vital question is,
What Should Marketers Do?
Whether you know for a fact that you have multiple pages ranking for the same term, as the marketers should check up on how traffic and search rank changes over the best few weeks. Given the timing, this could be especially difficult to evaluate if any drops are due to this change or should be attributed to the core update.
Doing so may actually help you expand your overall reach and get you found by more detailed searches.
And if you’re noticing some pages are being omitted from search results and think it may be due to the limit, try and go in and do some historical optimizations to old post and make them stronger for more niche, long-tail terms that could still get you found! Good Luck!