Every year, Google comes up with update(s) in its search algorithm to govern the rank relevance of SERP. Keeping up this trend, last month, Google rolled out a site diversity update that aims to bring in more variance in the search results.
What is Site Diversity Update?
In a series of tweets, Google Search Liasion explained what is site diversity update and the aim to roll out this algorithm. Here’s a quick look at what Google means by site diversity:
For years, multiple SERP from a single web domain featured in top ten results, which restricted the users to explore more options for their query. For example, earlier when someone typed “healthcare assistants job Australia”, Google would display multiple listings from the same domain. This limited the possibilities to discover other alternatives, eventually ruining the overall user experience.
In a series of tweets, Danny Sullivan from Google specified that this update is not really about the ranking. The pages that are already ranking well will be able to hold their position. However, if a website has multiple pages listed in the top ten search results, one will be removed from the first page.
For instance, if three web pages from your domain rank 1st, 3rd and 5th respectively, there are probabilities that the 5th page might drop down getting featured on the second or third page, irrespective of how well you have optimised it.
Here are the Key Takeaways of Site Diversity Update:
- Google will treat sub-domains as a part of the primary domain. For example, your page ‘products.haircare.com’ will be considered as a part of www.haircare.com and will be counted as two separate results from a single site.
- This algorithm will impact the core organic results and not the additional SERP like featured videos, snippets, image carousels or top stories.
- Apparently, this update will not apply to any country-specific domains or sub-domains.
- Though rolled out at the same time, site diversity is unrelated to the June 2019 core update.
- It’s still not perfect – the work on the site diversity algorithm is in progress. There are instances where you can find search results dominated by a single domain; however, you really have to try hard.
How will it Impact Rankings?
Unlike the medic update, this change is not significant; however, it can impact those who want their sites to dominate the SERP for specific queries. If you are into online reputation management, this update can give you sleepless nights.
