Just seems I cannot blog about anything else as I keep finding more mistakes around the web today. I go to search for some examples for a post about people being confused between organic results and paid results, and instead I find the following results when I search for the phrase “analytics” in Google:

Let’s first ignore the fact that Google Analytics ranks number one in its SERPs with sitelinks as a potential conflict of interest there (that is a whole other topic), but instead focus on the aspect that www.google.com has three sites ranking!

For the uninitiated in SEO, for every given keyword, you are allowed up to two pages ranking per sub-domain (exception are the sitelinks above). So, just how and why is Google ranking three?

It looks like Google is still having problems with differentiating secured and non-secured HTTP pages around the web and incidentally ranking secured pages as a whole other sub-domain (or site). I have had clients previously deal with these issues usually in a negative situation where the secured homepage would rank instead of the non-secured in a lower position.

Yet, here in the case for Google, with such a high PageRank on both “sites,” it is only an additional benefit for them to get around the two sub-domain pages per keyword limit. Not bad considering it’s a one-phrase keyword.