Google Search officially stops indented results

  Marketing, Rassegna Stampa, SEO
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Google has stopped showing indented results in the Google search listings. Google has historically showed an indented search result under the main result when it was from the same domain but over the past few weeks, Google stopped indenting those results.

What changed. Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, posted “We stopped doing “indented results” a few weeks ago.” Google stopped the intended results because “especially with continuous scroll, it wasn’t as helpful as in the past,” Sullivan wrote.

Google has been intending search results on and off since 2009.

What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of the old indented results from a few months ago:

Google Indented Results Host Group Example 1686148145 800x325

Now I see them listed out, without being indented and not in a specific order:

Google Indented Results Not 1686148145 800x528

What didn’t change. Google said its “diversity system still works to generally show only two results from the same site in the top results.” So Google has not changed how often Google Search may show the same domain for a single query on the same search results page. Google just won’t intent the result anymore.

Why we care. This change should not impact how many times your content is shown in Google Search, it just will impact how that second listing appears in those search results.

Will that impact your click-through rate in a positive or negative way is yet to be determined.


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About the author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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