Hi fellow SEO enthusiasts!

 

I have monitoring an ongoing project for some time now and we all know about Penguin and Panda however what do we know about 'domain crowding'?

 

To cut a long story short after trawling for information about SERP fluctuation I came across a blog article which was about Googles Domain Crowding Update; something that the Penguin hype might have pushed to the side.

 

Today I witnessed first hand my project site go from #5 to #9 in the blink of an eye! What pushed me down? Well here's the results.

 

1: Domain One

2: Domain Two

3: Domain Three

4: Domain Three

5: Domain Three

6: Domain Three

7: Domain Three

8: Domain Four

9: My Domain

10: Domain Six

 

Then not 10 minutes later back up, but to third and then 20 mins later back to the above pattern. The even stranger thing is the content of the pages from domain three all had the same titles and a crude *enter name* variants in the descriptions.

 

Found: http://seoenquirer.com/domain-clustering-domain-crowding-update-same-time-penguin-1520

 

So anyone got any reports?

It's something that I've been advocating for a long time. Why should a user be presented with 5 different websites on ten different results places. It should be a diverse range of results, websites and information.

 

With your instance, it could be a range of things at play here. It could be that domain three really does have the most relevant pages. I find now, after the update, that domain crowding still happens on low competition keywords. There has to be some give and take. There comes a point when a keyword is low on quality and multiple pages from the same domain really does answer the question.

 

Have you checked the link profile of the domain? Domain crowding, from what I've seen, stops multiple pages being ranked based on the strength of the domain. Amazon has a huge domain authority and google wanted stop websites like this having multiple pages ranking simple because of that. It's never going to stop every single instance, unfortunately.

 

Without know keywords, competitors etc its difficult to know.

 

Was that domain clustering there before? Or we're you ranking between them and you jut dropped?

No before the list was fine, the usual dance. I'm not grumbling for my serp, not a problem just thinking the previous domains below me got jumped to the second page ... some of which I feel deserve to be on page one due to quality but thanks to domain 3 having loads of poor pages (duplicate titles etc) I can't see the logic.

 

The drop theory is a good one, but I still retain the same order position. Before I ranked just under them so the insert of this 'solid chunk' of pages from the same domain is the only difference. The odd thing is the pages they have selected to form the 5 quite a few have the same title / description with tiny differences at best.

 

This is on the great scheme of things is quite a low competition keyword, but in this instance I was more curious if this is now fixed in place or if they are / were playing with their settings at their Google HQ yesterday.

 

As for domain authority, we just need a better link profile, a never ending task but then again who doesn't want a better profile?