Google Changes Handling of Domain (Navigational) Search

A thread at DigitalPoint Forums points out that Google has changed how they handle navigational like queries, such as typing into Google, www.seroundtable.com. I am sure other threads have it since that Google update, but I have never seen it.

In the past, Google only showed one result and gave you options such as find similar pages, see the cache, links to the page and so on. They used to look like:

Show Google's cache of www.seroundtable.com
Find web pages that are similar to www.seroundtable.com
Find web pages that link to www.seroundtable.com
Find web pages from the site www.seroundtable.com
Find web pages that contain the term "www.seroundtable.com

That no longer is the case, Google now seems to be matching it as a normal search on that keyword phrase. So it looks for pages that contain a keyword match for www.seroundtable.com. It seems it may favor sites with the www.seroundtable.com in the URL, file name, etc. but it also matches pages with that string within the body copy.

Yahoo! Search handles www.seroundtable.com search with a site command like function, that lists all the pages on the seroundtable.com domain.

Ask.com handles the search similar to Google, but they place a Smart RSS Answer at the top.

MSN handles the search like Yahoo, a site command search style.

Will this change the landscape of navigational searches? How many people go to Google to type in homedepot.com? And now when they do that, they may find competitors?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at September 1, 2006 7:58 AM Comments (5)

Comments

The operator "info:" is always here, if need be...

Posted by TOMHTML at September 1, 2006 09:39

Should be good to play with this one. Set up a page on your site about your competitors, include their domain name in the page title and body text and you could rank second for a navigational query.

Posted by mad4 at September 1, 2006 09:42

Adwords matching has been doing some odd things recently, you'll note this new results page extracts the words in the domain name and matches PPC ads against them. We reckon it's to increase their inventory.

http://www.search-engine-war.co.uk/2006/09/googles_domain_.html

Posted by Teddie at September 1, 2006 11:37

Barry - I see a ton of differences on this one. If you type in www.homedepot.com directly into the google search box you get results like a site: search. If you type it into the toolbar you get the homedepot home page. If you type in www.gap.com you get the new results you are talking about.

As usual we are all over the place but I certainly will be watching, and complaining, if the 'competitive' search results are shown for my client.

Barb

PS - I believe as do Marchex and other companies that many type the full domain address into search boxes.

Posted by webmama at September 1, 2006 17:42

Presently google is suffering from SERPs results errors.

Posted by kvcindia at September 2, 2006 02:33