Today I did a search on Google for Neil Gaiman, and saw the interesting result of the combined listing up top, showing links to the main site, the journal, work, cool stuff and things, and Fragile Things. The second result was for the journal… the exact same url as shown in the combined listing up top.
Checking this out against other searches, I see that this is fairly common. Is it fair though? Should Google be giving double listings for the same URLs? In this case, should they remove the journal link from the first listing, or remove the second listing completely? From a user perspective, they should probably place everything together in the first listing, but from a company perspective, that wants to dominate their SERPs, they’d want the second listing to remain. What do you think? Is it fair / user friendly as it stands?
August 27th, 2007 - 8:58 pm
I found a similar situation with respect to certain book title listings - but this time, it directly positively impacted Google.
Back in July, a search for the book title “A Briefer History of Time” not only yielded a number one ranking for the book through Google’s own books.google.com - with a nice little graphic of the book cover. I also noticed a little further down the page a second listing - pointing to the exact same page - sans book cover graphic.
I reported this to Mike Grehan’s blog at the time: http://www.mikegrehan.com/2007/07/organicpaid-switcheroo.html
I see that now, this is no longer the case. Nor can I find other typical one box entries that have duplicates.