Google lists multiple site pages - drop in rankings

[iain]

In the last couple of months I've noticed Google listing more than one page from my site for a single query. Conventional wisdom always said it filtered out and only listed one page. This has coincided with a drop in rankings.

Anyone else had this experience?

[chowell]

Iain,
We've also experienced this with a few clients. I'm not sure what's causing it or exactly why the rankings would be affected.

I'm wondering if there are two strong pages for the query and Google's not quite sure which one to rank higher. This may be one of those times that you choose to use a 301 redirect to put all of the effectiveness on one of the URLs.

[iain]

Hi Chowell
Yep, I'm thinking the same. I have IBLs to both pages (one is the home page), so I don't want to 301 because they have different, although connected, content, but it kind of looks like the ranking has been divided equally between the two.
Iain

[incrediblehelp]

These indented listing are quite normal and happen often per relevance or the query to the page AND site.

[iain]

Google always used to filter to only show one page. It's only change in the last couple of months

[incrediblehelp]

Iain that is not true. Indented results have been around for years.

[wige]

My understanding was that Google would only filter out the second listing if the page contained substantial duplicate content.

Just to be sure: is this second listing indented and immediately after the first?

[iain]

Guys
Yes the second page is indented (it's the home page).

I know that multiple page have been listed in the past, but not these have never been listed like this. For the last eighteen months or so only the home page was ranked high. The content changes frequently on it due to the article headlines I publish there.

My point is that perhaps Google has changed something now. The pages are on page #2 but the home page was on page #1 and the other page was nowhere. So it looks like the ranking now has been spread across the two?

[chowell]

Incrediblehelp/Iain,
The sites I'm talking about started w/ multiple URLs showing up further apart from each other, so there was no indent for the 2nd result. The result that used to be ranked better moved down about 20 spots and another newer page (relevant for the query) moved up higher than the original page (the site's homepage).

Recently, the pages have changed again - this time the homepage is listed first, followed by the indented newer page. Of course, this is how we would have expected to see the results all along, but that wasn't the case until this week.

[wige]

I remember reading somewhere that the break point is (or at least was) about 9, before the results would be merged into an indented result. I think that the two results may be averaged and then weighted such toward the rank of the higher one. IE if you have two pages that show up at 1 and 15, they would show up on different pages. If the second page moves up in the ranking to position 8, now they are on the same page and might be shown indented, in which case the two items are merged and their scores are averaged (to #4) and then weighted toward the original position of the higher ranked of the two, so it would end up around #2 or #3.

This is a theory, of course, consisting entirely of speculation based on the possibly outdated and potentially misinformed speculations, theories and conjecture of others.