This will either be a bit of a storm in a teacup or a fundamental change to how Google produces search results when users are searching for brands on the web.
First picked up by search blogger Malcolm Coles and now Search Engine Land, this is what is supposedly happening.
On SOME search queries for big brands ("Apple iPad" was the one Coles used), Google is returning a first page of results dominated almost exclusively by results from Apple.
What's the wrong with that?
Well, previously the results algorithm worked by displaying the most relevant pages found across the web, based on page rank, originality of content, title, influence, etc.
This would be the same across verticals, content types as well as photos, video and news.
A traveller searching for Expedia, for example, would ordinarily see results for the brand itself, news items, affiliate sites, high ranking content sites which mention Expedia.
But perhaps no longer:
Eight of the ten results on the first page when searching for "expedia" belong to Expedia or a Expedia-run domain. The remaining two are a Twitter profile and Wikipedia page.
The same could also be found for "opodo":
Seven of the ten belong to Opodo.
The point here is that results are being served regardless of page rank and existing SEO disciplines. Maybe it's just a freak of the searches carried out on a particular day for a particular brand?
A clearly concerned Search Engine Land eventually got a statement from Google [officials have yet to respond to calls]:
“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.”
So there you have it. Big is beautiful... when it comes to SEO.
Andrew Girdwood of BigMouthMedia is playing down the change:
"Search is about finding what you’re after. Google wants to be the best at doing that for you. This tweak doesn’t favour brands, certain types or anything like that. Google just used to think that searchers probably didn’t want t see more than two results from the same domain – now they’ve changed their mind."