Up until now a site with a good pressence in the index had two ways to be extra visible in the SERPs.

Sitelinks and the indented double listings.

But now Google has introduced a change to their ranking algorithm where a single site could not only be featured with a bunch of Sitelinks, but it could also own multiple listings on the first SERP.

Take the search “technorati” for instance

Before the change the search “technorati” held a number 1 spot for technorati.com + 8 Sitelinks + a “More results from technorati.com” at the top of the page.

But now it’s quite a different picture.

On my laptop running 1280×800 I could not see links to any other sites besides technorati.

So technorati.com holds #1 + 8 Sitelinks + a “More results from technorati.com” + listings #2 through #6 – 15 links in total.

Now, if you want to dominate Google’s first page then this change is great – but from a user perspective it’s utter useless clutter.

If I search for something and the #1 spot has 8 Sitelinks then I don’t need an additional 5 links to convince me to visit that site.

What I would really like to see is a few ALTERNATIVES to the #1 spot.

Before this change what you really wanted was the #1 spot because of the massively higher percentage of clicks it gets compared to the following 9 results. But in an effort to weigh effort against results you might have settled for a #2 or #3 spot and moved on to work on another keyphrase/page.

After this change there’s no such thing as “winning” 2nd or 3rd – if you’re up against an authority site then you’ll be “losing” everything and finishing last.

And that’s even if your page was a better fit for the search term than the additional new listings for the authority site.

Personally I think this is a bad choice of change in the search algorithm and hope and expect that they will change it back really soon.

What’s your take on it?

“Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered”

Wouldn’t it be nice to be notified about the following three things?

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

Well, if your sites are registered in Google Webmasters Tools then that’s exactly what you’ll be notified about (in Google’s own words) whenever they detects any of the following on your site.

Hacking, comment spam, spammy link profiles and probably other forms of spammy user-generated content on MU-sites and other blogging systems is a pain to have to deal with, so having Google looking out for you is a nice addition to whatever anti-hack and anti-spam system you have in place.

Most blogging software have some sort of anti-comment-spam, for instance Akismet or WP-Spamfree on WP platforms, and the same goes for forum platforms, but what about anti-hack features?

Except for keeping my passwords hard to brute-force crack and keeping WP relatively up-to-date I’m not really doing anything to prevent my site from being hacked, and this is where I think I will benefit the most from this new feature from Google.

It’s not that I expect to be hacked, but it’s nice to know that if I should be targeted then I’ll receive a notification from Google.