One Really Annoying Search Result at Google
By Matt McGee on Mar 3, 2008 in Google
Over at SEOmoz yesterday, Rand shared a collection of six weird and wacky Google search results and invited readers to share more in the comments.
I don’t think mine counts as “weird” or “wacky”, but it is annoying. When you do a search for [U2], this is what you get:
The band’s official site just got sitelinks for the first time, and what used to be the indented second link now stays in the No. 2 position as a non-indented, regular listing.
Is that really necessary? How about once you get sitelinks, you lose the ability to have a second listing on page one? You know, just for the sake of variety and all.
(FWIW, the same thing happens when you search for [small business sem], and I think that looks bad, too, even if I’m getting the extra spot in the SERP.)
7 Comment(s)
By sheseltine on Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
The ones that irritate me the most are those that both display as a sitelink, and as an organic listing. It’s not just that you’re getting extra shelf space, you’re doubling up on the click potential of a page, and is that ‘about’ page really that valuable for a searcher?
By Eric Lander on Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
This is incredibly frustrating — perhaps it’s something that we should respond to via the “Dissatisfied” link.
I love when you see this behavior in addition to the ten other links on the bottom of the SERPs labeled as “Searches related to: (query)”
By Linda Bustos on Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
Yeah, I noticed when entering a friend’s business in Google yesterday that all the sub-domains were also listed individually (main site, forum, blog etc). I thought Google was going to treat subdomains like sub-folders to reduce the amount of sub-domains that appear in serps. Has that supposed to have taken effect already or did they change their mind?
By rishil on Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
Well I agree from a users point of view it can be annoying, but from a search merketers point of view isnt it a dream come true?
We all try to capitalise our real estate on the SERPs, especially with blended search, and I would hold on to that one with dear life
By incrediblehelp on Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
Sure but this has much more to do with a websites internal linking and Google’s inability to handle websites linking to the same page 1-2-3 different ways. Really has nothing to do with Sitelinks at all. The problem is totally separate.
By Matt McGee on Mar 3, 2008 | Reply
@Linda Bustos — Good question. I don’t know the status on that.
@rishil — it’s not a dream come true when the competition gets the extra real estate.
@incrediblehelp — I know why it happens, but I’m saying it shouldn’t. Once you get site links for a given phrase/query, they oughtta be able to turn off that domain for the rest of the top 10.
Great comments, folks - thanks so much,
By PinkCakeBox on Mar 8, 2008 | Reply
Matt Cutts addressed this behavior in one of his comments. I find it hard to believe that people are missing sitelinks, but google claims their tests show otherwise: