'Host Crowding'...whass'it all mean...?

Date Published 10/12/2007 - Click here for more recent news

During the course of November/early December it became evident to the dedicated-Google-watchers in EASIserv.com Towers that something was stirring deep in the algorithmic undergrowth of Mountain View, CA.  There had been rumblings around for some little while that the total results being returned for particular search keyphrases by Google was undergoing the kind of 'tweaking' that is oft the precursor to some significant change. 

 

As a case in point, our own favourite long-tail keyphrase ‘web design northampton’ for which EASIserv.com has been No. 1 for yonks, had been returning 1.2 million (ish) results on google.co.uk – unchanged for the best part of a year or so and yet we were starting to see result returns as low as 200k for that keyphrase?  Incidentally, just to underscore how changeable 'search' has been, back in August 2006 for that self-same keyphrase ‘web design northampton’ ..... google.co.uk was consistently returning over 4m results.

 

Anyways, to get back to the 'host crowding' discussion ... what could be going on?  Well as is often the case these days, 'the MacGuffin' was casually dripped into the public domain by Google’s very own front-of-house, 'spin-meister' Matt Cutts - in his blog today (10th December) when he introduced us all to the Google concept they call “host crowding”.

 

What he related was that (and I quote), “for several years now Google has used something called “host crowding” which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname / subdomain of a domain name.  That approach works very well to show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches) Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain.  In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen in the future.  This change doesn’t apply across the board; if a particular domain is really relevant, we may still return several results from that domain.  For example, with a search query like IBM the user probably likes/wants to see several results from IBM.com.  Note that this is a pretty subtle change, and it doesn’t affect a majority of our queries.  In fact, this change has been live for a couple weeks or so now and no one noticed”.

 

So there you have it – straight from ‘the man’.  At EASIserv Towers we would take issue only with Matt’s comment that ‘no one noticed’ what was going on.  As mentioned at the start of this article, we certainly noticed that something was going-on…but as is often the case with the Googlers, we just didn’t know what it was that we were noticing – if you get our drift.

 

As to making an assessment of the likely impact of this change, it has both its supporters and its naysayers – probably in about equal numbers (amongst those who actually understand it).  What used to happen previously under the ‘host crowding’ regime was that often the Top 10 positions on Google Page 1, for a particular keyphrase, would typically be the territory of a small group of up to 5 power-players each having 2 results listed.  So in truth, customers weren’t getting the ‘best’ Google search result experience possible and this ‘subtle change’ by Google is going some way towards correcting that – which is good and we applaud it.

 

In terms of the ‘bigger-picture’ - with Google now ‘weeding-out’ from one to five of their previous ‘host crowding’ listings per page, it’s not hard to see how our total results pool for the ‘web design northampton’ keyphrase has been dramatically reduced by (circa) 1 million results. From looking at other keyphrases we routinely track for clients we can also see quite a difference over a wide variety of keyphrases but can also confirm the sighting of the odd 'host crowding' couplet here and there in the result lists - but they're as rare as hen's-teeth these days, that's for sure.  (Psssst, if you're still keen on seeing Google's 'host crowding' couplets... we've noticed that if you set your 'preferences' to display 100 results per page, you can actually see them quite readily: must be a feature of the 'algo'.  Mum's the word, eh?)

 

Where Google leads, others will follow and Yahoo! and Live/MSN are both involved in similar 'cleansing' exercises - we wish them well. 

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