Back in December, on the heels of the PubCon search conference, Google’s resident SEO mouthpiece, Matt Cutts, expounded upon the mega search engine’s improvements in terms of handling and preventing an overabundance of search results from one domain.
More specifically, the famed Google engineer stated that, “we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen in the future.”
At first glance, it appeared as if Google had indeed plugged up this little loophole that allowed enterprising SEOs to dominate the results page for specific search results, but then I happened to stumble upon the following two search results:
“ESPN” and “Google”
The results were staggering.
The go.com network owns 15 of the first 18 results for the term “ESPN” on the data center that I queried. Moreover, almighty wikipedia was the only outsider that managed to infiltrate the first page. And on an interesting side note, many of the results for this term are actually sub-subdomains (ex: sports.espn.go.com, soccernet.espn.go.com, etc…)
As for the term “Google”, google.com owns the first 16 results, which means that absolutely nobody is able to elbow in on their organic brand traffic. And there was no need for sub-subdomains in this case.
So what’s the key takeaway here? If you happen to optimize for a powerful brand and would like to ensure that no competitors muscle in on your hard-earned brand traffic, start cranking out the subdomains. If you’re really adventurous, create sub-subdomains as well.
After all, if the technique is good enough for media titans like ESPN and Google, it should be good enough for the rest of us.
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I noticed this several weeks ago when I was bumped off the first page for one of my keywords mostly by subdomains.
I hear ya, clickfire. Google’s treatment of subdomains definitely allows for that. It’s not always a bad thing, though (think reputation management).
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