On Friday Matt Cutts announced that Google would soon be imposing a change in the search algorithm that would limit the number of search results coming from one domain.
The news was broke by SearchEngineLand.com, which said it will make it less “likely to see results from the same domain name, if you already have been shown that domain name in previous results three or four times before”.
“Matt explained that once you’ve seen a cluster of about four results from a specific domain name, the subsequent pages are going to be less likely to show you results from that domain name”.
:The history for domain clustering within Google is as follows:
- There was no restrictions in the number of results per domain name. This turned out to be a bad thing, as Matt explained.
- Google added “host clustering,” that prevented more than two results per domain name to be shown in the search results. Webmasters got around this by placing content on subdomains.
- Google expanded the clustering to show a max of 3 or 4 results per domain, instead.
- Google then changed this to show more diversity on the first page of results but show less diversity on the secondary pages. So you’d likely not see more than two results from the same domain name on the first page, but you can see several results from the same domain on secondary pages.
- Launching soon is a change to this to show less from the same domain, even on subsequent pages, after you’ve already seen about four results from the same domain for that query.”
It appears this is VERY bad news for those trying to sell or those who have bought subdomains.
Chicago.com has been very active and successful in the sale of subdomains, CentralNic has sold a ton of third level domains and more domain owners like Criminallaw.com have hopped on the subdomain sale train.
The sale of subdomains are going to compete with the sale of New gTLD’s domains.
Google applied for over 100 new gTLD domain names.
I’m not saying the two are related but then again Google just increased the search value of new gTLD’s and devalued subdomains.
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