What's the real deal with keyword cannibalization

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some guru new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding here at Wix, and I'm joined by the amazing, the fabulous, the stupendous Head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome all to the internet people from around the interwebs, from every corner, from every platform, from every browser. Welcome to the SERP's Up SEO podcast where we'll talk about SEO in a podcast format.

Mordy Oberstein:

I know. I was going to say, by the way, we're back, but the audience has no clue what happened. To break the fourth wall, we realized that between the two of us, we were basically out the entire August and we were like, "Wait, wait a second. We have to do a podcast." So we recorded two months worth of podcasts in a single month, and this is the first time we're recording since then, basically,

Crystal Carter:

Honestly. And it's been so strange because I'm literally used to recording a podcast every day now in my schedule. And so not having a podcast every day, I'm like, "What? What time am I podcasting today? Oh, not podcasting today. That's interesting. Very interesting."

Mordy Oberstein:

I just glue my podcast mic around my neck, so I just walk around...

Crystal Carter:

Just walk around commenting on things. That was really fascinating. Have you considered how to do this? But this is a small price to pay for doing fantastic things here on the SERP's Up SEO podcast. And thank you to everyone. It's recently in recording time, but probably not recently in our distribution time for celebrating our 50th episode. That was really nice. And yeah, we look forward to many, many, many, many more.

Mordy Oberstein:

We look forward to 5,000 episodes. Short for the stars, Mordy. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our newsletter over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, so get that right into your inbox each and every month, but where you can also optimize your site CSS build sites with AI power responsiveness, build custom and reusable templates and widgets across multiple websites, all while being able to collaborate in new ways with your team and with the ability to create custom client handoff kits for smooth transitioning. It's all part of our agency-first offering, Wix Studio. Check it out over at wix.com/studio. You can also check out the new platform on the Wix Studio YouTube channel. I'll link to that in the show notes.

Oh, wait a second. No, what have I done? I told people to go to the YouTube channel and to wix.com/studio. I've given you multiple sources for the same entity? Will that water down the impact of you checking out Wix Studio? Have I cannibalized my Wix studio pitching efforts?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. Have you cannibalized it

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know. We're going to talk about it because we've finally come to that episode where we take up the age-old burning SEO question. Does ranking on the same SERP with multiple pages dilute your ranking impact?

Welcome to the keyword cannibalization episode. We're talking about what is keyword cannibalization? Does it actually exist? And if so, how and when? And by the way, Crystal and I have diverging opinions of this. We're going to get into it here in a little bit. I'm just saying.

Plus, should keyword cannibalization exist, is there anything to do about it? Zoey Ashbridge stops by to weigh in. That kind of spoils it because we're having somebody come in to tell you how to handle it. It must exist unless we're completely off our rockers, but that's something totally separate.

And we're going to get into the state of domain diversity on the SERP. Crystal and I will explore the topic. And of course, we have your snappiest of SEO news and who you should be following for more SEO awesomeness across social media. So cook up a side of fava beans and a nice Chianti as episode number 58 of the SERP's Up podcast chews on the idea of keyword cannibalization.

Crystal Carter:

That is a deep cut reference in more ways than one. I applaud the... Okay, fantastic. While Mordy revels in his puns and references there...

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, good.

Crystal Carter:

I'm going to get into a little bit of just chatting about what is keyword cannibalization. So in a fantastic article from Joshua George on the Wix SEO Learning Hub where he talks about how to find and fix keyword cannibalization for your e-commerce website, he gives a general overview of what keyword cannibalization is that is pretty on the mark.

He says, "In a nutshell, keyword cannibalization refers to having two or more pages on your website rank for the same keyword. This could result in weaker rankings, competing against your own content and search results for the same query and even confusing potential customers." And this is something that I personally have seen across the web and essentially what will generally happen is that somebody will make some new content, and one page is ranking for that keyword and then when somebody makes the new content, they will enter the fray, enter the chat with regards to ranking for that keyword, and sometimes the website will see a drop in the rankings for the original post and we'll see the new post maybe not quite make a big splash as they would expect it to do. And I've seen this happen like an inverse graph.

Basically as soon as the new one is posted, I've seen the other one go down. And this can happen for a few different reasons. I'll get into a little bit of that more, but essentially it's a pain, and it sort of gets into the area of duplicate content and that sort of thing. We covered that a little bit as well.

But basically, the long story short of it is you should be thinking about making unique content, and when you don't make unique content across your site, you can sometimes run into troubles and keyword cannibalization is one of those things. So Joshua George talks about it there. He also shares a few different ways where you can identify it. And another person who's also talked about this quite prolifically is Patrick Stox. And he was speaking of it in a more nuanced sort of way I guess you would say.

So with regards to keyword cannibalization, as Joshua George is saying, this is sort of the experience that we see on the SERP, what we see on the stats. What Patrick Stox is talking about is that yes, it is possible for two keywords or two pieces of content to rank for similar keywords. This happens across websites regularly. However, he points out that just because it doesn't show for the main keyword doesn't mean that it won't show for other variations of the term, so sometimes you can see this spread across lots of different ways. And I think that that is true. These things sometimes ebb and flow. I've seen it be the case where a domain had lots and lots of articles that were in the sort of same realm of topics, and this is really possible. So if you have a product or if you're writing about owls... I'm just looking around my room and I saw an owl. So let's say you have an owl.

Mordy Oberstein:

You got an owl around your room?

Crystal Carter:

I have an owl. My kid drew me a picture.

Mordy Oberstein:

You have a live owl flying?

Crystal Carter:

No, not a live owl. I wish I had a live owl, but I have an owl picture on my wall.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh no, that makes more sense than having an actual owl.

Crystal Carter:

My kid drew me a picture of a barn owl. Anyway, so let's say you have a website all about barn owls or whatever and there's going to be lots of times where you overlap and sometimes it's going to happen when you're doing a cluster even, where you think, oh, we're going to get into this cluster.

And the thing that's tricky about that is that sometimes you're not even trying to go for the same keyword, but Google will decide that these two pieces of content will rank for the same keyword, which is something that you have to pay attention to and monitor. And so I think that I've definitely seen this happen. It's definitely something that can be annoying, but it's not something that people are making up because we're seeing it in real time and it is something that can deciphered and can be unpicked. And Patrick, in his thing though, he says that the way people think about it is preposterous. Quote unquote preposterous he says at the beginning. He also says that if you see multiple pages that are ranking for multiple keywords, that you could let the pages fight it out for a particular query, but it makes more sense to think about opportunities where you could consolidate the pages where it makes sense.

Mordy Oberstein:

We want to rank. Multiple URLs will not make us tank. That's my protest. So to sort of frame this, so there's that sign that says keywords, if you have multiple pages ranking for them is going to dilute it. In other words, so if I have multiple pages competing for the same keywords as opposed to one page ranking number two, now both of them rank like five or six. That's the sort of general idea.

And to quote Patrick, "Keyword cannibalization does not really exist, at least not in the way many people think. The common belief is that keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages target the same keyword, compete against and hurt each other. Some people think if they have multiple pages about the same keyword, Google won't rank any of them. I find that not to be the case." So I want to say at the onset, there's multiple opinions on this and there's a side to each side. And it's SEO. It's not always so clear. There's no official handbook and Google, believe it or not, has been a little bit like cryptic about some of the things they've said here. You would've expected to find Danny Sullivan or John Mueller coming out and saying, keyword canalization is this or it's real or it's not real and they don't, and it's a little bit weird in my opinion. And maybe it's just a coincidence. I don't know. With that caveat, I will make the case against keyword cannibalization impacting rank, if I could, if I could.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay.

Crystal Carter:

Bear you in mind that I've seen it do it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, okay, That's fine. Okay, so one. Google cares about the best results period. I don't understand conceptually speaking. I'll run through the whole-

Crystal Carter:

When you say results, what do you mean?

Mordy Oberstein:

I will run through my argument.

Crystal Carter:

Okay,

Mordy Oberstein:

We'll run through it.

Crystal Carter:

Okay,

Mordy Oberstein:

I have multiple points.

Crystal Carter:

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. They care about the best results period. And it doesn't matter, from Google's point of view, whether or not the top 10 results have two URLs from the same domain or one URL. If those are the best results, those are the best results. I don't understand conceptually speaking how it helps Google. Let's say you have a page and it is the best result for this keyword. Why would Google say, you know what? This is the best result for this page, but because you have another page that's also ranking, we're going to lower what's the best result on that page. That's argument number one. I just don't see how it helps.

Also, Google has a domain diversity algorithm.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

They announced in, I think it was like 2019 Danny Sullivan announced domain diversity algorithm. But wait a second, if keyword cannibalization is already a thing, then it's already built into the algorithm, what do you need a specific domain diversity algorithm for? It's a contradiction.

The very idea of Google saying multiple URLs are ranking higher, they're ranking really well, we need to create a specific algorithm to make sure there's enough diversity on the SERP is inherently a contradiction to the idea of keyword cannibalization. Then there's what Patrick Stox shared. I'll leave that aside for a minute. But also the idea, and this is what kind of what Patrick mentioned, content overlaps. If you have a lot of content on your website, you're going to topically overlap to the point where it would make good logical sense multiple pages would rank for the same thing.

That's just the way content works. If you're going to have a lot of content on a website, you're going to topically overlap if you're sticking to what you should be sticking to, which is what you talk about on your website. The idea that Google going to cannibalize that kind of goes the way that content inherently is created. Why would Google do that? It doesn't make any logical sense. In fact, Google's saying, Hey, you know what we don't want? We don't want SEO content. They thought it’d be a helpful content update. They basically, we don't want you to write SEO content. Google demoting the rankings of multiple URLs because they're both showing up because they both kind of target the same keyword is basically incentivizing you to create SEO content and not create content the way you would naturally create content, which would result in overlap.

With that, there are multiple statements from John Mueller that I'll read to you that I think it's time to speak to this. And John, you know when John does his funny, sarcastic thing? Every time keyword cannibalization comes up, he goes into that mode. So someone asked, "John, I removed a blog that was causing cannibalization. Main page returned to the SERPs but on page seven for this term. Used to be on page one. All related keywords are on page one. Do we just need to wait?" John writes back, "It sounds like cannibalization wasn't a problem. How do you determine that it was causing your page to drop out of ranking? I'd be surprised if something as visible as that were to happen." Someone when else asked John, "Does creating a web story summarizing an article that was previously published on the site lead to keyword cannibalization issues?" John writes, "What do you consider keyword cannibalization issues?" So when asked, "John, how do we go about dealing with keyword cannibalization?", John writes back, "I guess it would help if you had a consistent meaning of keyword cannibalization."

By the way, last point, I do think keyword cannibalization is real. I think it's more about when you have something like you have multiple intents. In other words, imagine you had a blog about socks and you had a product page about socks and they're both ranking for socks, and the user is clicking on your blog post which is ranking higher, but then not on your product page, which is ranking lower. That would be cannibalizing your efforts. I think that's what Patrick is talking about with the opportunity stuff, which John has also mentioned in a video before. Anyway, that's my argument.

Crystal Carter:

So you mentioned the diversity algorithm and the diversity algorithm is really, really important to this. So with the domain diversity algorithm and in Patrick's thing, which to be fair, is from years ago. That's the other thing is that with all due respect to Patrick who's fantastic and brilliant and amazing, the article that he wrote is from years ago. His team from Ahrefs have also written on keyword cannibalization and how to do this much more recently and how to manage keyword cannibalization and how their tool helps you deal with keyword cannibalization and all of that sort of stuff. So with all due respect to that, it's a few years old.

But the domain diversity algorithm is important here. So one of the reasons why they have the domain diversity algorithm is so that you don't have a SERP that is just Nike if you're looking for articles about shoes, because Nike has all of the resources in the world to write a million articles about shoes, about trainers, about sneakers, about Air Jordans or whatever, and if you didn't have a domain diversity thing, then you would just have that. And in Joshua George's article and in Patrick's article, they both talk about performing host clustering to identify, using a host clustering search modifier in order to identify the pages that are ranking on your page or on your site for that page.

So I think Joshua George used the example of Amazon, of the different pages that they're ranking for instance. And essentially, host clustering is when you get around the Google domain diversity update with a search modifier. So you would essentially use a filter. There's a filter, and I think in the article he gives the exact syntax for what you need to enter into the search modifier in Google and then you can see all of the ones that are ranking for that page. So the domain diversity algorithm exists so that we don't have giant brands dominating the SERPs for a particular thing. And if so, that you can't just write the same article over and over and over again with a slightly different tweak and it just show lots and lots of times.

I think the other thing that's important to think about is that recency is a consideration with regards to ranking. So when they see a new article, they're like, oh, this is newer content. Oh, we should give it a chance to rank. So if that is pretty much like for like for an existing piece of content, then Google's like, oh, okay, well in the domain diversity thing, so once we put you into the host clustering, then we're going to push that one up. Then where do we put this one? And essentially, I think one of the things I like to say with SEO stuff is that with Google, with the bots, they're both incredibly fantastic and smart and they're also kind of dumb or whatever. It's really smart but it's also really simple.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great point actually, and that one I think might be more of a real case when I'm arguing. There was a case where you're saying, well, now both of them aren't going to rank well because they're both eating each other's ranking juice out. And I think that's where it gets a little bit tricky in my mind, especially because it's something of the domain diversity algorithm. Because if you had that already, why would you need the diversity algorithm? The algorithm is already doing it.

And to me it's a little bit of a funny thing because Google is able to understand we have duplicate content and say, you know what? You have multiple pages. This one we're going to index. This one we're not going to index. But then when it comes to ranking, they're all of a sudden super confused. Which one should we rank? Well, we can't rank both the same. Well, so we'll rank both lower. Why is that? Why would that be the algorithmic solution?

Crystal Carter:

I've seen it happen.

Mordy Oberstein:

Correlation doesn't equal causation, but leave that aside for a second. I've seen the opposite also, right? I've seen multiple cases where you have multiple URLs from the same domain ranking well consistently. And I'm not saying by the way that Google can't, and this again, I just want to be clear, I'm not saying that Google might not be confused, like which one should we rank here? Which is your page here? That I agree with that. And you see inverse relationships often with multiple URLs from your website on the SERP, but that's not to say that they're both ranking lower because of that.

Crystal Carter:

I think that this comes back to crawling, indexing, et cetera. So essentially within the domain diversity thing, you have Google understanding what is on your site and they understand what is most important on your site, right? With regards to what you were talking about and why it might be the case that you see an actual dilution of the ranking is that Google ranks pages. On your website, everyone will tell you that internal linking is an incredibly quick win and incredibly valuable effort for you to make on your website. That's because on your website, you're pointing lots of signals telling Google which things are most important.

So if you are splitting the impact of the keywords, for instance on your own website for let's say you have a website about shoes and you've published two articles about Espadrilles. So that means that you are splitting some of the signals within your site to tell them which pages are the most important for that particular site. And internal links, I have seen internal links also like when you lose internal links from your front pages, that will affect rankings across Google as well. So you're also affecting the signals that you're sending within your internal links as well.

So when you're thinking about what's going on the SERP, essentially you're changing the signals that you're giving to Google for a single, particular page, which is why when people are talking about keyword cannibalization, they often say that you should consolidate the pages so that you're concentrating the signals to Google about the quality of that page, both with regards to recency and with regards to links, with regards to architecture, with regards to all of that.

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's a great point. I'm not saying you can't do things on the page that would connect them together that would result in either both of them doing better or both of them doing worse. What I am saying though is that as an algorithmic solution, Google's saying, well, you have two pages, which is I don't think very uncommon across the web. In other words, again, it goes back to my earlier point, when you're writing prolifically around the same topic, you're going to overlap. The fact that Google would have an algorithm that says, hey, we don't like the overlap kind of goes against their whole idea of writing naturally and writing content that's not SEO content.

Crystal Carter:

I don't think it's the overlap. I think it's the signals. I think that when you're publishing this additional duplicate or whatever, it's reducing the value internally within your own website of that post. So it means that the-

Mordy Oberstein:

But it's not.

Crystal Carter:

Just like if you have a piece of content and you lose a backlink, you will very often, like a really good back link, you will very often see a ranking response to that. Similarly, if you're changing around the internal hierarchy of a piece of content within your own website, that's also going to affect the ranking signals that you're sending to Google and therefore will affect where it ranks.

Mordy Oberstein:

I agree that you can do things on your website and the way you structure and iterate the content that would impact how Google shows that content on the SERP. What I'm saying though is that there's nothing inherent to that. It's quite possible to do that the right way and do it in a good way where it results in both of them doing well. In other words, there's nothing inherent to the idea that you have multiple pages that could rank. If I'm searching for, I don't know. It's a one-size-fits-all hat good to buy. I can have multiple pages. I might have a page that talks about if it's good to buy for kids, I might have a page that's talking about if it's good to buy for adults. And Google says, we're really not sure what the intent is here. We should probably rank both of these. They're both from them the same website. We can't rank both of these the same. Well, we have to rank both of them poorly. That to me just doesn't make sense.

Crystal Carter:

I don't think similar content is a problem. Where I've seen this happen is essentially where we... There was one time where I saw a website and we had a piece of content that was working really well, and then we published a piece of content that was in the same neighborhood, it was adding more value to the general topic. However, the URL slug was pretty much the same. The URL slug was pretty much the same, the topic was generally the same. They had different content, but a lot of the signals, a lot of the tags on it and a lot of the topics that we were covering and a lot of the things were pretty much the same. And the main piece of content that was doing really well, it started going down. And when we moved around some of the internal linking, we saw that improve and I've seen this happen in other cases.

So I think that where you have a lot of signals that are targeting the same keyword, not just the topic generally, but a lot of signals as well as the topic, and I'm talking like meta tags and things like that and lots of different elements, you have a lot of those signals and they're targeting the same keywords and it can happen in that case.

With regards to publishing of similar content and keyword cannibalization being good or bad, I've definitely seen it be the case and I think that there's sometimes an opportunity where you might be like, yeah, we're going to go for some of these long tail keywords and yeah, it might cannibalize us, but we can kind of take the hit. It's a standard business practice where you have somebody who will, you get businesses that will go into a place and they have the ability to do a scattershot. So they can put in 10 cafes and they'll take out all of the smaller cafes and they know that they're running a loss-leader. So it is a possibility where you might have a situation where you want to run a loss-leader so that you can take out competition in an area.

Mordy Oberstein:

Again, I agree cannibalization can exist on the SERP. I'm not saying you can't cannibalize your efforts on the SERP. What I'm saying is that there's nothing algorithmic about Google saying we're going to demote both of these pages because there's two of them. And I think that if there's a case of Google's like, hey, which content is it, they'll choose one. If they think both of these pages are very similar, both of these pages are great, the idea of demoting both of them just doesn't make sense.

Crystal Carter:

I think what I've generally seen is that, I generally see this happen with new content being published. So new content will be published around a similar thing and it's been published about coordination-

Mordy Oberstein:

You'll see the pages swap out.

Crystal Carter:

No. We'll see the main page demote and then we'll see the other page not really do anything. And that's the thing that I've seen most often. And normally this is when we can….

Mordy Oberstein:

I've seen a lot of cases where you put out a new piece of content and Google will rank that. Well, we'll take the one that was ranking and be like, okay, maybe this one's better and let's flip it around. And a lot of inverse relating to what was ranking number three now ranks number eight. What was ranking number eight now ranks number three. So that would kind go against the idea of keyword cannibalization killing both of the rankings. The one that was ranking number three, everything is still ranking number...

One of the pages is always going to rank number three. It's just a matter of which one is it. And I'm not saying that's a good thing to do or a bad thing. It could be a bad thing to do because you don't want the first one to lose that number three spot and to be in number eight.

Regardless, there's two sides to this story. You decide if you're listening to this and let us know on social media who you side with. I will pay you to side with me. Just let me know.

Crystal Carter:

I'm sure everyone who's paying for keyword cannibalization tools will side with me.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. But anyone who's saving their money will side with me. And Patrick will side with me. Hey Patrick, if you're listening. Being that we think we both agree there are legitimate cases in some construct, however you want to slice it, of keyword cannibalization, how do you go about fixing it? To help us with that, we have Zoe Ashbridge, the founder of Forank on how do you fix cases of keyword cannibalization?

Zoe Ashbridge:

In terms of keyword cannibalization, before you get into fixing anything, I would recommend that you actually go and check the SERPs to see if you've actually got a problem that needs to be solved. Sometimes when two pages rank for the same keyword, you actually end up with indented SERPs now. So when that wasn't here, keyword cannibalization was nearly always a problem. Whereas now it can actually be desirable to have these two pages ranking. So if you've got indented SERPs, don't worry at all. If you've got two pages ranking on page one, you probably don't need to do anything there either. If you've got two pages ranking but they're not indented, I might recommend just keeping an eye on them. But I've had sites rank for a long time with two pages on page one, so I would recommend just not trying to fix anything unless it's causing you a problem with clicks or something like that.

When keyword cannibalization needs fixing, you'll notice one of the following problems. So you'll find that maybe you put a page live, you know what you wanted it to do and it's just not ranking. That can be one indicator course. That can be a multitude of other things as well. Other signs that you need to fix cannibalization would be if you are seeing queries within Google Search Console showing two pages that are ranking for the same keywords. This one does require a little bit more research as well, because if you've got one page on page one and one page is on page four, then it doesn't really matter. So you do need to dig into the nuance a little bit.

And the third potential problem, and this is probably the most obvious one I think from a cannibalization issue, is you might notice that you've got two pages that are struggling to rank. And I think this often shows itself in the average position line. So if you can see a page that's bouncing, maybe it's on page one minute, page four the next, then it's on page two, page six, it's kind of struggling to hold a rank, this can be because of cannibalization. The two pages that you've got ranking for the same keyword kind of fighting for their position in the SERPs. The thing to do to start solving this problem is to search the desired keyword, so the keyword where you've got these two pages ranking, and take a look at Google and see what should be ranking.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thank you so much, Zoe. Really appreciate that. You can find Zoe over on X, Twitter, whatever we want to call it, @zoeashbridge, so that's at Z-O-E-A-S-A-H-B-R-I-D-G-E over on Twitter slash X, whatever you want to call it. Thank you so much again, and check out forank.com, which Zoe is the founder of.

Now with that, all of this talk about keyword cannibalization this and keyword cannibalization that, let's dive into what happens on the SERP as it pertains to domain diversity, which we spoke about a little bit earlier, and what Google does and doesn't do when showing multiple URLs from the same domain. So we're taking a little bit of a directional look at things with the segment we call going, going, going Google. And it's going, going, Google. It's out of here. We've already spoken a ton about keyword cannibalization. Let's quickly just run through where there are cases, as we kind of alluded to a minute ago, where Google kind of ignores that sometimes. For example, indented results are multiple URLs showing up for the same domain and domain diversity goes out the window for that sometimes.

Crystal Carter:

So with indented results, it's something that has emerged fairly recently. And Zoe spoke to this in her section, and this is something that's evolved recently. We covered this on another topic, but it seems to be something that also has to do with Google understanding and consolidating some things across subdomains as well to sort of make things work there. So yeah, indented results, if you've not seen these, is when you have, let's say you had a domain that was about ice cream and the query was like raspberry ripple or something, and you would have the main page that was talking about raspberry ripple, which might be a product page. And then underneath of it you might have something that was like, why raspberry ripple is the best ice cream flavor in the world. And then you might have another one underneath of it that might be like things to pair raspberry ripple ice cream with. And then another one, which might be a support document for how to open your raspberry ripple ice cream container or something to that effect.

And what you get with that is Google trying to hedge, essentially, hedge what the intent is of the user. Because I think that what people need to remember is that Google's main MO is to deliver good information to users. Sometimes when users enter terrible queries, like if you were to just enter raspberry ripple, which is not a good query, like what do you actually want?

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly, exactly.

Crystal Carter:

Then Google's trying to help you. They're like, do you want this? Do you want that? They've probably got some disambiguation things. They've probably got some bubbles. They're like, well, do you want pictures? Do you want videos? Do you want a recipe? What do you want with that?

So I think that it is important to look at that and to see that. And yeah, the indented results are Google trying to balance what you might need. I've looked at the indented results previously and a really good one is to look at baggage sizes for airlines. When you're looking up baggage sizes for airlines, they often show across multiple domains and it's the same content, whatever size the bag is, but they'll show it across multiple domains and in subdomains even. And that's an interesting iteration of that.

Mordy Oberstein:

And there's multiple cases like this. I found or still find actually that Google, when it comes to documentation, kind of throws it out the window. Also, Google will show a result, but if I have a document from your knowledge base that's similar and Google's like, we love knowledge base content. Let's throw that up there also. Obviously, for a branded query, those are cases where you should obviously dominate.

Now you know where there's often not a lot of domain diversity? Is in our SEO news section where it's often Barry Schwartz, which I could not be happier about. So here is this week's snappy news. Snappy news, snappy news, snappy news. This week we have three for you, all three from Barry Schwartz over at seroundtable.com, two of them about SGE. First up, Google's search generative experience light version. Google has tested a what's being described as a light version of the SGE, or what I like to call the AI box at the top of the SERP. What basically it means is instead of the full on ginormous SGE box showing up at the top of the SERP, what you basically have is the beginnings of that box, say half that box, and then a show more button, so you can see the access to the full box. Sort of like where you go to a webpage and you see that, read the full article button, that kind of thing. And then you have the organic results right underneath it.

What this does is it sort of combines the best of both worlds in a way. You do have the SGE box there, but the organic results, the traditional organic results are still in purview above the fold with the way this box is formatted. I kind of like it. I think it solves a lot of problems and I'm wondering if this is where they're going to go, but we shall see.

Continuing on the SGE front, and again from Barry Schwartz at SE Roundtable, Google search generative experience can create images and text. So what's cool, I love, by the way, I love AI for images. I use it all the time in the Wix platform. There's an automatic AI image generator, and now Google is bringing it into the SGE. I wonder if this does make things like Midjourney less relevant if this does go full-on live when SGE rolls out.

It does make sense that Google's bringing this in now that Bing is doing the same thing with daily. Basically what it is, you could search for, I don't know, Google SGE, please draw me a picture of Barry Schwartz smiling and you'll get a picture of Barry Schwartz smiling hopefully. I don't know. I haven't tried it yet, but it does mean that image creation via AI is available in SGE per the latest update, so let's see what happens with that.

And the last up, again, from Barry Schwartz over at SE Roundtable, indented results are gone. Google Search stops indenting results. Why? I love indented results. What indented results were was basically you ran a query on Google and you had the URL from the domain show up, and underneath it were other pages from the same domain indented in, so it was like a massive result from the same domain. I actually liked it because you would get multiple resources from the site that you actually wanted to go to and get multiple different kind of perspectives from that site or multiple resources from that site.

For example, if you were to search for how to do SEO on Wix, you might get a blog post from the Wix blog, you might get an article from the Wix SEO learning hub. You might get an article from the Wix knowledge base. It kind of gave you a full-on, 360-degree purview of the topic from that website's perspective kind of thing and I really liked it.

And it stinks that they're gone. I actually enjoyed that search feature. Google's Stanley Sullivan, who's their official search liaison, commented on X, Twitter, whatever, saying, "We stopped doing indented results a few weeks ago. It's unrelated to the core update." Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There is still a domain diversity algorithm, so you will not, in general, it can happen and sometimes makes sense that it does happen, have more than one URL or a lot of URLs from one domain showing on the results page, but the indented format of that is gone, which I think again, stinks. And with that, that is this week's version of the snappy news.

Wouldn't it have been ironic if this was the one week we didn't have an article from Barry? Is that impossible? Not even possible?

Crystal Carter:

No, not possible. I don't know. I don't know when he sleeps. He is just like, tells us all the Google things.

Mordy Oberstein:

The guy is amazing. Anyway, with that, as we slowly are inch our way closer to the end of this podcast, of course we want to give you a person to follow on social media for more SEO awesomeness. And this week, we have Andy Chadwick from Keyword Insights. Andy is fabulous. You can find him over at Digital Quokka. That's @digital, just spelled the way you would normally spell digital, Q-U-O-K-K-A. We'll of course link to Andy's Twitter profile in the show notes. And obviously, we need to throw out a mention to his partner in crime, Zuganthan Mohandass, at the same time.

Crystal Carter:

I think we should also just shout out to the bars, the sick bars that Andy recently put out. He recently put out a track about keyword clustering, a rap song about keyword clustering.

Mordy Oberstein:

We'll link to that in the show notes also. It's a great little video he did kind of spoofing the SU industry and keyword research and stuff.

Crystal Carter:

Right. It's fantastic. It's absolutely wonderful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Loved it. It's so good. So make sure to follow Andy, Andy Chadwick from Keyword Insights over on social media and that'll do it for us today.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, there we go.

Mordy Oberstein:

I hope I didn't dilute things too much. I don't want it to be like a cheap bar where they dilute the alcohol.

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. I don't know. We got some homeopathic SEO things going on.

Mordy Oberstein:

Throw less ice in there. I don't need ice. I need the...

Crystal Carter:

I was at a bar once and they were charging like 20 something dollars for a cranberry juice and then they tried to take my ice and I was like, no, that's like three dollars worth of ice. That's mine. You can't have it. No.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well...

Crystal Carter:

There we go.

Mordy Oberstein:

There we go. Well, with that, thank you for joining us on the Serp's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week with a new episode as we dive into how to level up an SEO team. Look for wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix SEO learning hub over wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO learning hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO.