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Same Subdomain Results in SERPs: What is Excessive?
January 11, 2006
Sean asked me how long Yahoo had been positioning more than two URLs from a given subdomain on its SERPs, and I didn't have a good answer.
In the Yahoo query for [apple], for example, eight of the ten results come from the www subdomain of apple.com. There's little doubt that Apple has earned a top placement for that search, but I believe that relevance is questionable when the algorithm shows links to the French, Japanese, and German home pages as well, from a computer with a US IP address, set to default English.
(And I'm not trying to be Americentric. If I were German, searching from www.yahoo.de, I wouldn't want a bunch of English-language results either.)
Where are the trade mags devoted to Apple technology? The blogs? The Apple section of Slashdot is the only non-apple.com URL listed. Is that enough?
MSN is similar, but with different apple.com URLs from the www subdomain. The only non-apple.com page is the Wikipedia page for Apple.
It's not confined to Apple. Try searches for other major brands and see what comes up.
Typically, Google doesn't place more than two pages from any given subdomain on one SERP. (You could argue, though, that there's little difference between Yahoo showing more than two instances of one subdomain and Google's habit of showing up to two instances per subdomain, but from multiple subdomains.) While I know that no single engine dictates the gold standard for "mix" of domains on a results page, I have become accustomed to Google's ratio. I'm not saying there's a right and wrong ratio, but the Yahoo/MSN situation seems unbalanced. What do you think?
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at January 11, 2006 11:38 PM
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