The default is 10
Then they add in various other things like news, video, images, local results etc.

Those additions are generally known as universal search

Then you might have results included from your social circle – I have quite a large social circle because I follow lots of people on different social networks, so I almost always see them in the search results.

Google 20 Results Per Page

This isn’t unusual in itself, you could select 20 results before, but now even if I go into advanced search and select 10 results, or manually add &num=10 Google is still giving me 20 search results.

Pseudo Site Search 20 Search Results

A couple of weeks ago Google rolled out what I coined pseudo site search. I spent so long trying to gather data, work out exactly why it was happening and come up with a name for it that Malcolm got the drop on me writing about it.

I should point out pseudo site search isn’t brand – there are more prerequisites – there has to be a very specific indication in the search query that the intent might have been to perform a search query for a specific domain, but either the searcher was unaware of syntax or just lazy.

Commercial Reason For Google To Make Change

A week or so back Dan Taylor of Destination 360 mentioned in a comment on the travel technology blog Tnooz that for the search query [bellagio las vegas] he was seeing 7 out of 10 results from Bellagio.com – travel is a competitive even for hotels as a specific destination and Dan happens to have a page that might rank even higher for Bellagio Las Vegas now (thanks for the great example search result)

I was an idiot and didn’t grab a screenshot then… sigh.

So here is a current 20 page result of which bits were being pushed around. It isn’t now showing a pseudo site search.

Everything below the current #5 result for Trip Advisor was being pushed onto the 2nd page of results, and trip advisor itself was at #10 with Vegas.com 8 & 9

Now imagine that everyone was forced to have 20 search results like I currently am for US searches… I still get 10 in the UK & Poland.
Whilst those results for hotel review sites would be pushed down, they would still be on the page, and a reader might be more tempted to scroll down a 20 result page.

Significance

For some search queries I think this would be useful, though it might cost Google revenue as there are no ads at the bottom half of the search results if people did start scrolling.
It may also result in the 2nd page of results being totally worthless, rather than just very low traffic, for all search queries.

This doesn’t mean you should ever be happy with a page #1 search result – the fold line – the part of the page immediately visible when opened gets most clicks, thus unless someone is using a very high resolution monitor anything below result #3 is frequently severely hampered.

Also with personalization and region there are significant variations in what is seen in the results.

You will also tend to have a lot more double search results in Google.

I would assume this is just a test for now, though Google did roll out the pseudo site search to everyone at once.

Update

There is speculation that Google will announce something regarding this tomorrow 8th September 2010 (more on Techmeme)

I love my double or indented listings, but it was not to be.

We have been together for a long time, but fate has determined that at least for the present, we must separate.

The Google giveth, and The Google taketh away

For my site, on a search term such as “Andy Beard” the second listing doesn’t make a huge amount of sense unless it is a fresh post, as most people would be just doing a navigational query.
Maybe in the future Google would add a most recent post as a replacement.

I am not sure this is new or normal, I don’t spend a huge amount of time studying US SERPs recently, and in Poland I still have an indent.

I highlighted the paid results because I have also recently noticed the linked page appearing higher in my SERPs for Andy Beard. IMReportCard at least attempt to write something useful, though I am not sure their writers have enough specialist knowledge to delve into SEO topics and I have noticed that the financial incentive to post one fo the first 3 reviews often encourages people who haven’t got a clue to write really flimsy reviews.
All the reviews are intended to be factual, without expressing a specific opinion, and are written by their staff. They say they are not going to use affiliate links for the products, and have added some Adsense to cover the cost of paying for reviews, comments and other participation. Interestingly enough, you also earn credits for all your referral’s activities.
I have seen a few negative comments, so it might not be heavily moderated, though it is hard to determine the ownership of the site which I think should be more transparent.

It would be great if I could use a referral link to link through to my review on IMReportCard – they would get a lot more deep links with anchor text that way.

There Needs To Be A Level Playing Field

When Ebay purchase a site like StumbleUpon and eventually includes a footer link, and possibly some contextual links to product pages that are search engine followable, are they paid links also?

They only paid… what… $75M for 1.5M blogs (and growing) located on subdomains, so $50 per blog

Damn that is cheap link buying, how can the little guy compete? Actually I have been told there have been much better deals.

What happens when someone buys WordPress.com, not because of the advertising revenue which apparently currently keeps them about “break even” but for link equity?

Those innocent “An Ebay Company” aren’t so innocent when you look at how they are controlling Google juice on some of their other acquisitions, it is not always a 2way flow.

How A Little Guys Can Compete

• A little guy can buy paid links from a site like Yahoo for $300 per year, which Google still give a weighting for.
• A little guy can pay to have some kind of linkbait developed which is only loosely related to their core business, but will bring in links.
• A little guy can pay for press releases that unleash mass duplicate content on the Web
• Rather than buying a whole Web2.0 Social network, a little guy can buy up expiring domains, stick some content on them with links, or redirect them to their primary site.
• A little guy can use a devious trick and use an affiliate program that has SEO friendly redirects, eventually robbing affiliates of the search positions they worked hard for that allowed them to send traffic.
• Rather than buying a complete website, a little guy can buy a single page review of their product or service from someone who can relate to it or give expert opinion (paid posts)
• Even cheaper, at least short term, a little guy can buy text links from relevant sites – high quality relevant links are not always possible for every industry, so sometimes they have to buy them from lower quality sites, or sites that get relatively little traffic.

I totally disagree with Aaron at SoloSEO that paid links and paid reviews should be discounted & devalued, because we are not looking at a level playing field. I could agree that irrelevant links should be discounted, in fact that should happen regardless of whether a link is paid for or not.

Robin Good has been having some problems with reduced traffic, and thinks a broken sitemap might be to blame.

Later he determines that it is not the sitemap, and one of the causes might be non-compliant text-link-ads (Sphinn Story)

What I had not paid attention to was a notice inside GWT that clearly said that while the errors it had reported for Master New Media did limit Google ability to fully index our site, these errors would have not impacted our Google search results or rank. In fact nonetheless visitors were still a small fraction of what we normally see, all of Master New Media pages were properly indexed by Google and the official PageRank was also firmly set at 7.

He then writes a 3rd article thinking that it definitely is text link ads to blame.

In the 4th article he has determined that TLA are probably not to blame, but will not be reinstating them.

He has some duplicate content problems with multiple domains apparently hosting the same content for possibly a different audience. Ultimately in that situation you are splitting link equity between multiple variations of the same content, but you wouldn’t expect a massive penalty from Google for all your content (75% drop in traffic)

In the end the little guy ends up buying more contextual advertising from Google in the form of Adwords on both the search and content networks.

Paid Links Above The Fold

Here is a slightly new concept for you.

Place paid links more prominently for users to click on, rather than hiding them in your footer

1. You are going to make sure they are highly relevant to your audience
2. They are clearly intended as advertising with the SEO benefit secondary
3. You will get paid more for them

Alternatives Going Forward

Google can remove emphasis on links
or
Google should concentrate on the people with the biggest wallets, Ebay, Amazon, Corporate America (or China for that matter) and find a way for massive link equity acquisitions to be discounted… retroactively.

The core business of a dental practice isn’t paying someone to create a funny “tooth pulling” game in flash just to get links.

How many real estate agents does it take to write an article “the top 10 mistakes in buying a house” to reach a consensus?

Those Real estate agents really do have to compete with Ebay owning Rent.com
Just take a look at the footer of Epinions.com and Rent.com to see how Google Juice is being channelled around by corporate players.

As a general rule, companies that can afford to advertise are making money and looking to expand their services. Companies making money are more often than not pleasing their customers.
If they are pleasing their customers, then surely if they appear at the top of search results that is a good thing.

If they appear at the top of search results because they are effective at SEM, and possibly buying links, that doesn’t mean that text links are creating poorer search results, in fact it could be argued that it helps for better search results with current algorithms.

For further reference take a look at Michael Grey’s previous writing if you are new to paid link and Google F.U.D. discussions.

Update: Whilst I wouldn’t class Aaron as an egomaniac, he has written a great lists of ways to buy links without being called a spammer.

I use Google for a lot of searching every day, I am sure more than 95% of casual users. I am not talking about checking ranking, as things like that can be automated with Google’s APis and various tools. When I need to find information, I use Google Search.
I have seen Google suggest other related terms to try such as this, which appears at the bottom of a page when I search for “insurance”.
The Google Related terms normally look something like this:-

But I have never seen this search result configuration before.

Maybe I have been searching with my eyes closed, or not keeping up with the news

It seems Google is taking the top results for the search term entered, and then using some kind of LSI or related term to provide alternative results.

Here is a longer view, showing the 3 + 3 + X layout

Better Search Results?

In this particular search, the related results were probably equal to the results for the specific term. I am sure this will help casual searchers a lot in finding things they need.

The Long Tail: Low Hanging Fruit

This could be a disaster for niche marketing targeting low hanging fruit and niche terms with low competition. If you are not in the top 3 results for the long-tail search term, you are relegated to 7th place or lower.

Adwords – Give Me More Money

On this particular search, I didn’t see any advertising, but then I am in Poland not the US, and there is so much information on terms like this there isn’t much money to be made selling things.

However, if Google are going to be showing SERPs for more popular LSI related terms, it seems only logical that they are going to also add the advertising inventory.

This might affect 2 things

• Prices on niche terms increasing
• A need to pay even more attention to negative terms in Adwords

Hmm is this exclusive content, or am I a year out of date and need to take my blinkers off?

Darren Rouse Logs

Someone was checking results for Darren on Yahoo. How do I know? I spotted it in my MyBlogLog stats that they had clicked through.

I was actually quite shocked

So I decided to go and check it out…as you do, as you do ;)

Changes at Yahoo

Well I was aware that Yahoo might have had a little tweak of their algorithms recently. I hadn’t been seeing much search traffic, but then this blog really needed to “settle in” a little.
Looks like they have fixed things a little…

Yes, I bet you wish you could rank for uncompetitive terms as well

Darren Rouse in Yahoo

I think Darren Rouse is in many ways a harder term to rank for, because he gets talked about so much.

Ooh… is that a tag page

It is actually a poorly optimized one as well – now WordPress 2.1 is finally here I will get to work a little.

Actually if you look at the single post that was on the tag page (before this one), you will notice that the only mention of “darren rouse” is in the page title, and the tag on the page.

Darren Rouse in Google

Do Google still like tag pages?

It looks that way, but then it might just be an “allintitle: Darren Rouse” thing.

Anyway this is just a small demonstration on how easy it is to rank for uncompetitive terms.

There are still millions of untapped niche markets waiting to be explored / exploited

I have been monitoring some of my new and old domains, both those on public display and various niche sites. This was especially important to me because of some of the redirecting I had to do to this new domain from andybeard.name and niche-website.blogspot.com. It was also relevant for my WordPress Plugins site because that had previously been PR5, but when I changed the domain over because of the WordPress Trademark, that was lost.

Things I have noticed this time round

It seems the internal pages of Andybeard.eu are starting to gain some toolbar pagerank, such as this page on Nofollow which is showing PR4
My Google Reader post that enjoyed some link love from a number of notable blogs (though most didn’t agree with me) had been showing in the Google Webmaster Console as being the highest PR page on my site for both November and December. That is now PR4 as well.
In theory I should be seeing some PR showing on the WordPress Trademark discussion, but nothing shows.

It is strange that Google thinks this post on Paid Links is my highest pagerank page. Yes it has been linked to, but nowhere near as much internally compared to other pages, and externally it was linked to, but again, not a huge amount.

On the bright side, my WordPress Plugins site has regained its pagerank of PR5. Internal pages are not quite up to date yet. I noticed for instance that my tags page has PR, but categories and individual tags do not. The same is true of most of the admittedly few content pages on the site.

Matt Cutts in the comments regarding the Pagerank Updates has stated it is worth waiting for a few days to see how things develop before blowing alarm whistles. Matt is on holiday for a week, so I will wait at least that long before saying anything.

This site seems to ping-pong out of the SERPs for various terms, one day in the top 3, the next buried down 10 or more pages, for relatively solid content with in-bound links.
I recently talked about meta refresh, and that Google seem to be following them. It almost seems that one day they are giving me benefit, only for it to become some kind of invisible penalty the next. If I could upgrade my blogger account I could probably get a more permanent redirect setup.

Why am I monitoring Pagerank so closely?

Currently this blog is setup for some massive ball linking. Pagerank is dispersed extensively on every page. That being said, I also cultivate my links, rather than hoarding. People leaving comments gain a backlink as do people kind enough to link to some of my content.
I certainly need to improve all my archive and tag pages, and get a real sitemap setup.

I have other linking structure alternatives planned in the near future, hopefully all automated. Hopefully front page pagerank on this blog will start at PR5, one Google have juggled things a little.

It seems it was Google just juggling numbers, because not only were terms such as “WordPress Training” not showing my tag page near the top, but also terms such as “WordPress Trademark” had disappeared completely.

I was still receiving search traffic on newer content, but it seems Google were re-evaluating lots of my other content.

I still need to take the time to make some of my duplicate pages a little more unique. What I will probably end up doing is adding some RSS feeds to my tag pages, and making the excerpts a different size. I will probably also include all posts for a particular tag on the same page.

I still monitor my traffic extensively.