Google Search to stop sites from appearing multiple times in top results

Abner Li | Jun 6 2019 - 4:21 pm PT

Google today announced a change in Search designed to prevent sites from appearing multiple times in top results. Rolling out now, this aims to improve site diversity on Google Search as requested by users.

This tweak to Google Search aims to address how some queries return “many listings all from the same site in the top results.” According to feedback received by Google, searchers want “more variety” in their results.

Referred to as the “site diversity change” by the official Google Search Liaison Twitter account this afternoon, users will no longer “see more than two listings from the same site in our top results.”

When the same site appears in top results, it’s often hard to distinguish the difference between pages and why one is better than the other. Additionally, this allows different sources to appear on the first page and nearer the top where people are looking. This diversity could aid traffic to smaller or less frequented 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

There are exceptions to this policy when Google determines it’s “especially relevant to [return multiple results from the same site] for a particular search.” For example, specifying a specific retailer in your lookup. Subdomains are considered part of the room domain, but there are again exceptions when applicable.

Site diversity will generally treat subdomains as part of a root domain. IE: listings from subdomains and the root domain will all be considered from the same single site. However, subdomains are treated as separate sites for diversity purposes when deemed relevant to do so….

The Google Search site diversity change is launching now, but different from the June 2019 Core Update earlier this week that tweaked algorithms.

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