Google Site Diversity Change May Have Big Impact on Yellow Pages Publishers

Google announced on Twitter that it had launched a “site diversity” initiative in addition to the core update announced this week.

The goal of the initiative is to provide more diversity in results which could impact Yellow Pages publishers who try to rank category searches as well as individual businesses on their Internet Yellow Pages (IYP).

“This site diversity change means that you usually won’t see more than two listings from the same site in our top results. However, we may still show more than two in cases where our systems determine it’s especially relevant to do so for a particular search.”

Google Search Liaison via Twitter 07/06/2019

It was generally agreed that it was challenging to rank more than three businesses from an IYP (including category searches), but this initiative means that it will be almost impossible unless there are extenuating circumstances.

The change means that Google will treat subdomains as part of the root domain (i.e. considered from the same single site) except in cases where it is deemed relevant for diversity purposes.

Recent research has also shown that click-through to websites/landing pages are down as more query answers are presented in the Google SERP, which will put further pressure on traffic to IYPs.

While some IYPs have strong direct or branded traffic, most are heavily dependent on referrals from Google to businesses or category results.  This change, along with more answers directly on the Google SERP, will force publishers to continue to innovate on IYPs or watch their traffic degrade.

This post is based on key findings from the 2018 SIINDA Landscape study which looked at almost 40,000,000 data points across eight countries and 400,000 SMEs to provide insight into the quality of their online presence. The data was processed and analysed by Silktide, a web intelligence company headquartered in the UK. Silktide makes software to help people understand and improve their online presence. (www.silktide.com) and SIINDA.com: The Digital Marketing & Local Search Association (www.siinda.org)