If you haven’t experienced this for your targeted keywords, you are lucky! Go to the Google webmaster forum and you’ll see multiple complaints about the issue.

 

For some reason Google has started showing results from the same domain name multiple times in SERPs. In some cases, one domain is dominating 50% SERPs on the first three pages, displacing several good websites in the process.

 

What’s even more surprising is that some of these sites do not even use the search query in the text and may or may not be as relevant as some of the lower ranked website for the particular search term.

 

So, I have been going through several SEO forums seeking some explanation for this perplexing change.  Found two insightful posts in the process:

 

Google Showing Multiple Listings From The Same Site Too Often

 

Dear Matt Cutts, Domain Crowding Is Shockingly Broken

The latter quoted a response from Matt Cutts, saying they are looking into the issue. I saw similar responses on Google Webmaster Forum as well.

Here are a couple of them:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/VHUsB8Kq0Kk%5B1-25%5D

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/websearch/unexpected-search-results/0IWfgSReofY%5B1-25%5D

The problem is, so far I haven’t seen any significant changes in the search results. In addition to that I found this  video by Matt Cutts, where he has actually defended showing the same result multiple times—“when we think its useful and it doesn’t hurt diversity”.

The question is, how is one domain overcrowding the SERPs not affecting diversity? As a user I would want relevant search results from multiple good quality sites, instead of being bombarded with results from one website, no matter how useful it is! If I want to do a deep search, I’ll do it myself. I really wouldn’t want Google to decide for me which site deserves a deep search.

From the webmaster point of view, this is a rather distressing development, as it gives some sites a very unfair advantage over others, especially those that do not have the luxury of huge budgets for their SEO campaigns.

So, will Google address the issue soon? I don’t know. Google’s stand seems rather confusing for now. On one hand, we have posts saying they are looking into the issue. On the other, there’s a video saying that if the ‘best site in the world’ dominates SERPs it’s fine!

Based on my experience and the advice I received from the Keyword Academy forums, it seems going forward, the best strategy is to focus on long tail keywords based SEO. Other than that, we can only wait to see, if Domain overcrowding is a temporary glitch or a conscious decision by Google.

 

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