Google has updated its handling of domain based queries which sounds like an SEO issue, but this post is filed under Pay Per Click, read on and find out why.

A high proportion (you'd be shocked) of internet users don't appreciate there is a difference between typing a URL in their browsers location bar and typing it into Googles search box, for big sites the number can be in tens of thousands per month. Historically when you entered an address such as www.ebay.com Google would either forward you directly to it or in some instances display a summary results page containing some additional links to information about that URL and not much else. If you had your DNS server set up wrong it would sometimes cause an error, or site not found result which is evidently a bit embarrassing if you're a big brand. Now Google has started showing an actual search results page (SERP) containing lots of results, even websites that have your domain name in them, instead of forwarding you to the domain. IE:  http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=www.ebay.com

What's the reason? We've had a little brain storm in the office and reckon this is to boost their Pay Per Click inventory - the number of Pay Per Click adverts Google can show. If you do a check you'll also notice that as well as showing additional websites that contain references to the domain in question they are extracting the words within the domain name and serving additional Pay Per Click ads against them.

It will be interesting to monitor how this effects the performance of our Pay Per Click campaigns.