Google’s Search Liaison announced a “change” that will reduce duplicate site listings in the search results. The goal of this change is to show more diverse websites. This change is called the Site Diversity Change. It’s a change to how Google shows websites in the search results, but it’s not a change to how Google ranks websites.
Site Diversity Change Takeaways
1. Not Part of June Broad Core Update
Although this change launched roughly at the same time as the June 2019 Broad Core Update, it’s not a part of that update.
2. Not an Update – It’s a Change
Google made a point to refer to this as a change, not an update. Google used the word “change” multiple times to refer to this change and did not use the word update.
3. Site Diversity is Not Across the Board
The diversity change does not affect all search results. Some search results will continue to show more than one result if Google decides it’s relevant.
In my opinion, depending on the context, when Google says “relevant,” it can be helpful to understand that word in the context of the user. SEOs commonly think in terms of a web page being relevant to a search phrase.
But many times it makes more sense to think about relevance in terms of how the web page is relevant to the user who is typing the search phrase. When put into that context, Google’s use of the word “relevant” makes more sense because if users expect are satisfied with more than one page from a single site, then it makes sense for users to continue showing more than one page from that site.
Here is the original tweet by Google SearchLiaison:
“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….
This site diversity change means that you usually won’t see more than two listings from the same site in our top results. However, we may still show more than two in cases where our systems determine it’s especially relevant to do so for a particular search….
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…
Finally, the site diversity launch is separate from the June 2019 Core Update that began this week. These are two different, unconnected releases.”
Google’s Danny Sullivan Reveals Site Diversity Launch Date
It was Google’s Danny Sullivan, tweeting from his own Twitter account who tweeted that the change launched approximately on Tuesday June 3rd, 2019.
Google’s Danny Sullivan tweeted:
“It started a little bit about two days ago but went fully live today. Personally, I wouldn’t think of it like an update, however. It’s not really about ranking. Things that ranked highly before still should. We just don’t show as many other pages.”
Read the official Google Site Diversity launch tweet here.
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Roger Montti, Khareem Sudlow
