How many serp results for a domain.
-
I thought this one was carved into stone, max number of results from the same domain in SERP is... two. Or... three?!
I was searching for some familiar keywords and found three results from the same domain, isn't that... unusual?
-
No problem! Great as always!
-
lol
Thank you, Patrick.
-
Massimiliano, you have earned the position of "niche authority" and multiple positions on the first page of Google can sometimes go with that.
Nice work.
I have a site in a retail niche where the only content that exists (other than my own) is product pages. With all of that content being so visible my site is now the "go to place" when people want information in this niche. I have an index page for my content library and most of the visitors to that page are "returning visitors".
The problem with this position is that amazon, walmart and other large retailer customers can not get answers to their questions from where they purchased their items. So a lot of those questions come to me. We have become customer service by default for people who purchased where help is not available. This is a bit of a curse but if you sell products that require consumable supplies, you can attract a steady flow of customers because of your published expertise. And your replies to the email questions that you receive can be improved into your next page of content.
-
Thanks for the long answer EGOL.
What I intentionally didn't mention in my question (because I was curious to learn if the fact by itself was revealing of anything special going on) is that those results are from one of my sites, the one with the lowest PR/DA/mT, where I write freely, without a schedule and not caring much about keywords, density, and all the usual suspects.
It is about a niche subject, and I think you are totally right.
-
Have a look at the following article it may help you with the answer :
-
Google likes to share the results between domains, but that is only one consideration, all other things being equal you would expect to get a mix of domains, but if the pages win out in other ways then there is nothing to stop them ranking
-
I stood and applauded.
-
This often happens in those industries where staff at the major players feel that their industry is "boring" and use that as an excuse to get out of writing content and the best SEOs that they can find are unable to produce or find anyone who can do the job.
These topics are not boring. There is a lot of content to write. All you have to do is ask the person who takes incoming telephone calls at the office and she can give you a very very long list of the questions that people are calling to ask. Every day people call in with questions about selecting the product, how to fix the product, accessories for the product, how to maintain the product, how the company brand compares with competitors, which parts should be purchased, information about no-longer manufactured items.
This person might not know the answers to all of these questions, but she is extremely underutilized by this company.
Instead of answering these calls and transferring them to Joe in parts, Sam in repairs, Willie in sales, etc., she should be promoted to the much higher paying position of "director of content marketing" and supervisor of all of the people who receive these transferred calls. She should be able to identify the articles that need to be written and assign them to a person on the staff who has the content area expertise to write them. If Willie is a horrible writer she can team him with a person who can interview him and maybe a photographer/graphics person and get that part of the the job done.
Let's use "hydraulic jacks" as an example. Go look at the top ten in google and you will find almost nothing but skimpy product pages and category pages and maybe a doorway page or two. Nobody has written anything worthy beyond the folks at wikipedia.
A few people are searching for "hydraulic jacks" but the people who spend the money are looking for deeper information about parts, maintenance, safety, how to use, repairs, new models, etc. Right? The people who ask about this stuff are consumers and buyers and folks who get grease on their hands. The lady who has been answering their phone calls probably knows them by the sound of their voice. They spend a lot of money at this company. A really lot of money.
Now, after our director of content marketing makes assignments and gets all of the needed articles back she should have dozens of articles on how to maintain, dozens on repairs, dozens about how to use, etc. etc. She then takes these to the web development team and the SEO team, who she is also the boss of, and tells them to get these articles on the site and optimized for the words that people say when they call her on the phone. She knows the keywords of the industry better than an SEO in NYC who never got grease on his hands. He doesn't know jack about hydraulics.
She gives them a logical structure of this library of content... a folder about parts, one about repairs, all segregated by makes and models. When this stuff is launched, that hydraulic jack company has totally carpet bombed the SERPs and after these articles start ranking a search for "hydraulic jack repair" will yield several results from this company on the first page of the SERPs. That search will display their repair service page, the index to their library of repair content and a couple of their most important repair articles will be on Page 1 of Google. They might get four positions out of the top ten.
Here's a secret to making this happen. When somebody starts talking about content cannibalization put your fingers in your ears. Making lots of articles associated with the more highly searched queries in your industries is how you make this happen. You can't get four positions on the first page of google if you listen to the guys who tell you that content cannibalization is a sin. Its where you find the meat.
Other companies could have done this. They just listened to guys complaining about nothing to write about in their boring industry.
Just get the right person directing this important marketing effort. The person who understands the queries that people use to get information from your company. She has been taking your calls for the past ten years. Now she has enough knowledge that she is underutilized.
-
Hey Massimiliano
No, this is not unusual at all. If the SERPs feel one site has 2 or 3 pages that best represent a search query, they will present those.
This is nothing unusual when it happens, especially if a site caters to a broad topic and has multiple pages that touch on a certain aspect of that topic.
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Blogging on multiple domains
We have three different domains for geotargeting (za,uk and .com). Each site at at the moment has the same content with only country specific details changed like currency etc. What is the best way to get maximum SEO benefit when posting new content.When we post new content should we repost to all three domains (the same content) or will Google only index the url on the domain which is crawled first. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
Blog.domain or domain.com/blog
My client can't do domain.com/blog because he's on wix. I'm thinking blog.domain.com. Do you have any resources for the pros and cons of this? I understand that google looks at them very similarly now, is that true for google +?
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Will an identical site impact SERP results
I came across two identical sites for two different business owners in the same industry. I'm sure you've seen these. A web company offers individuals in the same profession a template site with the exact same content for each site. All that is different is the domain. i.e. mycompany.com/news/topicsname will have the exact same content, images, tags, etc. as mycompany2.com/news/topicsname. I would assume having the duplicate content, especially if two site owners are in the same town, will ultimately hurt the rankings of at least one site. Is this correct? Thank you for your help.
Technical SEO | | STF0 -
Domain taken. Which is better? Using hypens or longer domain.
I am wanting to set up an e commerce site and the domain name that I want is taken. I am considering using a domain that has the main keyword I want to rank for as the domain. I have heard chatter of google penalizing these types of sites and it seems that it hasn't come about. This is something that I would like to test out. So if "electricscooters.com" is taken, should I use "electric-scooters.com" or "electricscooters4less.com" Just wondering if the hyphenated or the longer domain will rank higher. The site won't be spammy at all, I will carry a few different companies that offer similar products. So for this case, I would only sell scooters from a few different manufacturers. Feedback would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Dave_Whitty0 -
Google SERPs and NoIndex directives.
We have pages that have been added to robots.txt as url patterns in DisAllow. Also, we have the meta noindex tags on the pages themselves. But we are finding the pages in index. I don't think they are higher up in the rankings and they don't have any descriptions, any previews or any cached pages. Why does Google show these pages? Could it be due to internal or external linking?
Technical SEO | | gaganc0 -
Domain restructure, sitemaps and indexing
I've got a handcoded site with around 1500 unique articles and a handcoded sitemap. Very old school. The url structure is a bit of a mess, so to make things easier for a developer who'll be making the site database-driven, I thought I'd recategorise the content. Same content, but with new url structure (I thought I'd juice up the urls for SEO purposes while I was at it) To this end, I took categories like: /body/amazing-big-shoes/
Technical SEO | | magdaknight
/style/red-boots/
/technology/cyber-boots/ And rehoused all the content like so, doing it all manually with ftp: /boots/amazing-boots/
/boots/red-boots/
/boots/cyber-boots/ I placed 301 redirects in the .htaccess file like so: redirect 301 /body/amazing-boots/ http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/ (not doing redirects for each article, just for categories which seemed to make the articles redirect nicely.) Then I went into sitemap.xml and manually overwrote all the entries to reflect the new url structure, but keeping the old dates of the original entries, like so: <url><loc>http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/index.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-07-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url> And resubmitted the sitemap to Google Webmasters. This was done 4 days ago. Webmaster said that the 1400 of 1500 articles indexed had dropped to 860, and today it's climbed to 939. Did I adopt correct procedure? Am I going about things the right way? Given a little time, can I expect Google to re-index the new pages nicely? I appreciate I've made a lot of changes in one fell swoop which could be a bit of a no-no... ? PS Apologies if this question appears twice on Q&A - hopefully I haven't double-posted0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0 -
When should you turn off redirects to your new domain?
Our website moved to a new domain a year ago, and we have our original domain to redirect to our new domain. We're working on contacting people who still link to our old domain to ask them to update, but 7% of our traffic is still coming as a redirect from our old domain. My question is, when should we just shut the old domain down entirely and stop redirecting people to our new domain? Or should we just keep it up indefinitely? What would be the positive or negative impact on our new domain's SEO if we shut the old domain down? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | UWPCE0