Back in August this year, Google announced that they will be showing more results from the same domain for certain queries, depending on the relevance of those pages to the search query.  That development has been further finetuned and yesterday Google announced on the official webmaster central blog that Google could be showing up to 4 search results from a domain.  Originally, Google used to show only up to 2 results from each domain. 

Here’s what the blog update says about this most recent change:

“With this iteration, our search results may show:

• Up to four web results from each domain (i.e., several domains may have multiple results)
• Single-line snippets for the additional results, to keep them compact ”

There are a couple of implications for SEO professionals as well as organisations who undertake SEO campaigns for themeselves or clients.

Site-level optimisation

One, it further reinforces the idea that it is no longer enough to target optimisation efforts at a page-level; optimisation has to also happen at a domain-level ie. increase the overall “weightage” or “authority” of the site to get much more benefit from higher search engine rankings. 

Need for greater depth of content

Two, this change can definitely hurt “smaller” websites that cannot or do not create sites with great depth of content on each topic.  Therefore, a site which has in-depth content that covers a particular “keyword/ phrase” will in have a greater probability of getting greater visibility in the search results than say a site which has just one page which covers that keyword/ phrase.

One could also look at it as an opportunity for a SEO pro to potentially target to “optimise” 4 pages on a site for a particular keyword instead of one page. 

Tougher for smaller sites

It does seem that this development does tilt the balance considerably in favour of larger sites. Of course, not that it is a completely new phenomena; this just skews things a bit more. Taken together with Google Instant Preview, which is  likely to demand website owners to create better designed and more professional looking websites (and therefore make a larger investment towards that), SEO success  for small business websites might have just become a bit more tougher/ competitive and expensive!

- Manoj Aravindakshan