So the long-running SERP Changes thread on WMW is always interesting and the general feeling seems to be that Google have changed something in the algo as many people have authority sites exhibiting the kind of strange SERP behaviour we documented the weekend before last.

We also still think there’s likely something bigger coming shortly, but also noticed a post in there 2 days ago mentioning these two datacentres as possibly showing updated Pagerank on them?

• http://64.233.179.184
• http://64.233.187.84

No pagerank changes visable here, but on these datacenters, various searches now show this (new?)  effect whereby they split the SERP into three sections, the first with the first 2 results, and then a “did you mean” box with unrelated results before the rest of the page’s contenders

screenshot.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing is very much dependent on where you are placed, above or below the fold.

We have seen this for the occasional big one word query before, where there were legitimately several meanings but not very often, and never for normal, smaller SERP queries.

So are the #1 & #2 slots about to get even more precious? Anybody else seeing this much in smaller searches on your travels?

Holler back ya’all