The ever excellent Malcolm Coles discovered that Google is essentially treating some brand searches as site: command queries – allowing these brands to dominate natural search space, although how these brand queries are decided isnt quite clear as yet. Malcolm outlines a number of pertinent examples inclduing Apple, The Guardian and Sky Sports.
There is also a post over at Search Engine Land with some more insight, and patent guru Bill Slawski has the inside on this patent which was approved back in May 2009 .
……..and the Big G itself has confirmed that this is a ranking change, telling Search Engine Land:
“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.”
Tags: google, google serps, search results, seo news
