The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
It’s common to hear SEOs discuss the “increasing dominance” of big brands in SEO, and how smaller companies just can’t break into the rankings like they used to. Google even put out a “domain diversity” algorithm update[1] a couple of years ago to address the issue, and people like me have shown time and time again how metrics like branded search volume[2] and domain authority[3] — typically signs of a big, well-known company — are key predictors of search performance.
This post, though, is to share some surprising data we’ve surfaced at Moz suggesting that, actually, right now is the best time in years to be an outsider in SEO.
What is domain diversity?
I think there are two appealing ways to define domain diversity, and we’ll look at data for both.
Normally, “domain diversity” is used to refer to a greater number of unique sites appearing in a given SERP. For example, if you have three results from Pinterest and two from eBay on the first page, that is an example of very low domain diversity. I’ll talk about this as “per-SERP” domain diversity below.
The other type of domain diversity I’d like to discuss is the extent to which the biggest sites dominate SEO in general. If the same few sites are ranking top 5 for any query you can think of, that doesn’t necessarily mean low per-SERP domain diversity, but it is still a very homogenous and inaccessible search landscape. I’ll talk about this as “overall” domain diversity, but this is also the domain diversity metric shown on MozCast[4].