Why Domain Crowding Might Not Be a Bug

If you are not up to speed on domain crowding hop on over here and read up on it, then come back to read through my take.

We know the following:

  • Google doesnt make much money off of the long tail
  • Long tail queries and sub 20+ rankings sometimes brings to the surface sites that otherwise shouldn’t even really be listed for the query

My personal opinions on the matter:

  • Many times I have seen domain crowding, albeit not all instances, its on the back of the index (20+ rankings) or when a domain name is inside of a long tail query
  • If Google sees your website portraying the query on your site repetitively, on many different pages, you might get the crowding effect

Engineers are always looking for scalable solutions. So instead of having to fight spam piece by piece this could be an easy way to push  ‘mediocre’ sites out of users clicks. Googles take is this could help quality at the same time getting users to search more and click on more ads (maybe that was the intention but that might be too much conspiracy theory). If a user sees the same site 10 times listed they are more than likely going to search again, and possibly get off the long tail query that got them to the domain crowded results set.

It wouldnt surprise me if this gets tweaked back a bit (as Getstat points out overall its a bad user experience) but I expect to see this line of thought going forward as Google continues the push against spam and ramping up brands frequency in their index.

Immediate Ramification:

  • If you rely on traffic from queries that have other people and or companies names in them you might want to rethink that model