Google SEO Basics - Understanding SERP Results -Indented Listings

You must have all seen Google's indented listings before on your search travels, it's where a website shows two or more page entries for the same query. It happens a lot these days, Google have been showing two for several years now, but lately show three and sometimes even four pages from the same site when they think they are all good matches.

It usually happens in not-so-competitive search terms but can happen anywhere when conditions are right, but understanding a little more about the way the Google SERP works can give you an edge over your chart competitors, so we just wanted to explain a little about the way it works, and what you can learn and act upon from the information.

However before we start looking at search results it is important to understand the nature of the Google search system these days, and make sure that you are searching correctly, otherwise you are just wasting your time, because the data you see will be so erratic and random as to be almost no use at all.

It is crucial to understand that Google is very likely showing you your own special or "personalized" set of results, which is often very (or totally) different to what it's showing others for the same keyword search.

Have ever done a Google search for your hub, and seen it in an extremely good position, say #2 or #3 for a search term, but when you tell your friends look, or you look on someone else's computer, it's not there?

- Welcome to Google personalized search. It used to be that you had to be logged into a Google account for this to work, but not any more, it comes as the default setting now, and you have to turn it off one way or another to see the "true" or "benchmark" rankings. There are several ways to do this listed at the bottom of this hub, but for now we'll just use the easiest one: You simply add &pws=0 into the URL search string, so the whole Google search URL would be:

http://www.google.com/search?q=personalized+search&pws=0

So lets look at some example Indents we're quite familiar with: SEO Services Ibiza

In the example above you can also see the code &num=10 added to the end of the URL, this is the command that tells Google how many results to show on the page, and it is this that is the key to seeing the real positions, underneath the Indented additions.

Basically, the way indented listings work, is that a second page is able to "piggyback" on the rankings of a first page within the same site, as long as it is on the same results page.

So how do we see the "real" (non-indented) positions?

It's simple, you just repeat the search, showing only the first result, i.e. &num=1, and then continue repeating, adding 1 to the number of pages shown, until all becomes clear, as shown in the sequence below.

Note however this does not work any more on Google "Instant" you now have to switch it (Google Instant) off (pic top right) otherwise Google completely ignores you and continues showing 10 results. 

So up until now this seems pretty straight forward? However from position #6 onwards you will not the bottom half doesn't change, and a second page from the #1 site is actually ranking at #6, but because it piggybacks the #1 ranking, it now forms an indented #2 listing. 

Indented listings are desirable, because they improve your click through rates, for fairly obvious reasons, you now have twice the Google "real estate" hence twice the presence, so you should see approximately twice the hits for the term once you establish the second listing.

But indents can also be useful for more subtle SEO attack or defence tactics, i.e. "SERP control" or "Reputation Management". All you have to do is get a second page from your site onto the first page of Google results, and as a bonus you push all the sites below you down a position.

Taken together in context with an understanding of "how to outrank other hubs" this becomes even more interesting, because you can see that if you can get your hub to the first page, where there is already another hub ranking, even if you can't outrank it, you can quite possibly hitch a ride underneath it as a HubPages indented listing.

Then all you need to do over time, is continue pointing enough links at it to finally swap their positions over, as Peter has now managed to do with his "SEO Services Ibiza" hub, over ours showing at Positions #3 and #4 on the screenshots. (currently :)

Obviously knowing accurately which pages are actually ranking where allows you to direct further deep links to the specific pages to hopefully bump them to first page level and get yourself a second listing along with yours (or someone else's :) current first page listing.

So hopefully some of you didn't already know this and may find the information useful in your SEO & hubbing adventures, and we'd like to take the opportunity to wish everybody good fortune and a prosperous 2011.

See you all next year, best regards from Ibiza.