Recent updates to the Google search engine now allow brands to dominate the search results pages (SERPs) with a single website.
Brands like Apple, Sony, Dell, and HP can now control the majority of the front page, allowing for an SEO based Internet marketing monopoly.
What was initially thought a bug, Google has confirmed the algorithm update:
“We periodically reassess our ranking and UI choices, and today we made a change to allow a larger number of pages from the same site to appear for a given query. This happens for searches that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain.
“We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.”
However just a few weeks ago Google’s Peter Norvig spoke about providing diversity in the SERPs: “We haven’t figured out any way to get around majority rules, so we want to show the most popular result first, but then after that, for the second one, you don’t want something that’s almost the same as the first. You prefer some diversity, so there’s where minority views start coming in.”
So where will this new update leave the small time Internet marketer?