Last month Google changed the way it ranks sites by allowing multiple from the same website in the serps (recently this was changed so that more than four results were compacted - the so-called petit-fours. This move has had quite a few SEO practitioners to criticise its effect. An example is this: search for Religion Menswear in google.co.uk and the top 3 results are from the same website. That means that the site that used to be ranked number 2 in the SERPs is now relegated to rank #4 - with all the loss in organic traffic that ensues. Some estimations of click share percentage in google serps indicate that dropping from position 2 to 4 means a 50% decrease in organic search engine referrals. Other estimations of click share percentage show an even greater loss of up to 80%.

There is not enough data to estimate how bad the effect is of having multiple sites dominating the search engine results. In general, the sites that do really well are now doing really really well, and the sites that were just doing well are now doing less well. The net effect of this is that there is less variety of choice and more work for searchers to find the content they want. From an SEO perspective, it means that it is harder to get to the top, but once you are there, it's harder to get knocked off. It also helps people who are doing Negative SEO by making it easier to push competitors websites down the SERPs by having multiple pages of similar interlinked content on the same domain - SERP Sinking.

Bing and Yahoo have yet to follow this practice, which could be of benefit to them. I find that SEO gets resutls is a lot faster for these other two search engines - leaving Google to suffer a considerable lag when trying to get pages to the top of the rankings. It looks like Google is becoming disconnected from what its users want and is also becoming too bloated to be able to keep up with the rapidly changing web. Could this be the tipping point for Bing to take market share?