Google’s Gary Illyes said in an SEO office hours video that you may want to consider consolidating pages that end up in a host group in the Google search results.
Host groups are when Google shows two results from the same domain, one indented under the other.
Gary said, “It’s a telltale that you have more than one page that can rank well for a certain query.” “You might want to consolidate those two pages perhaps, if it’s possible at all,” he added.
This came up at the 11:02 mark into the video.
This is not really new, the host groups documentation also says that, it says “Consider if you want people going to one of these pages instead of the other, and setting that one as the canonical.”
Here is the embed where Gary said this:
A host group is two or more consecutive text results from the same site that are grouped together because they are ranking for the same query, Google explained.
Here is what indented results/ host groups look like in the Google search results:
There is some confusion on why Google would recommend this. I think, and I can be wrong, is that from a Google perspective, you have two pages that are trying to rank for the same thing, so consolidate them so one of those pages can potentially rank higher and the pages don’t compete with each other. From an SEO point of view, you don’t just have one listing but you have two listings in the search results, so your click-through rate will be higher.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
