Google announced last night, as I covered in detail at Search Engine Land, that they released another update earlier this week that finished rolling out yesterday. This update restricts how many times a search results listing can show in the Google search results for most queries.
In short – Google said for most queries, they will begin only showing up to two listings per domain in the top search results. This does not meant Google will only show two listings from that domain for all search results pages but rather for queries they think is makes sense to show more diversity from different domains for a query. Branded queries may show more than two, and you get the point.
Google said they generally won’t show more than two results from the same domain in the top Google search results. Google may still show more than two results if they determine a searcher would benefit from it and it is relevant for the query.
For the most part, Google will treat subdomains as part of the main root domain. So blog.domain.com would count towards domain.com being listed in the top search results. Of course, there are examples when Google won’t consider them to be part of the same domain, like some hosting platforms will use subdomains to host unique sites – and Google will consider those separate.
Google stressed there would be some cases where more than two results from the same site will be shown if it’s especially relevant for a particular search. It added that subdomains and root domains would be treated as part of the same single site, but “subdomains are treated as separate sites for diversity purposes when deemed relevant to do so.”
