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I had an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) client call me today to point out something quite interesting.

If you do a search for Adelaide Mortgages, you’ll see this:

Click the image to Enlarge it

Whilst Mortgage Choice’s SEO/SEM crew must be congratulated, it’s hardly a good advertisement for Google’s local Business Listing system, is it?

Late last year, Google, including the Big Cahuna himself, flagged changes to the way that subdomains were to be treated in their search index.

The idea was that no longer could a company tie up the first ten results for a particular term (let’s say “iphone”), using separate subdomains such as:

• apple.com
• store.apple.com
• blog.apple.com
• iphone.apple.com

In the past, companies have been able to tie up vast tracts of search results, by having two listed pages ranked for each of their subdomains.

Whilst this idea from Google is in theory good, there was always going to be some hand-tweaking of their filtering algorythms. For example, the Blogger.com and Wordpress.com domains have millions of subdomains, all unrelated, and run by different bloggers. Clearly bloggers using the Blogger or Wordpress service should not be penalised because of Google’s new rules.

So the task of deciding which domains would be able to show multiple subdomain results in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) fell to some mysterious entity within the walls of the Googleplex.

Surely these decisions couldn’t be influenced by commercial considerations? Of course not, as we all know - Google Isn’t Evil.

So How do we explain this screenshot then?

Click the image to enlarge

Not only have Google broken their rule about not showing more than two results from the same domain, they’re even showing a crapload of results from the same subdomain!

Wierd.