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When using long tail search phrases for products (items to purchase), google generally returns multiple URLS for various ecommerce sites, but it hides additional urls for each site behind show more results.

Each site tends to get one URL in the SERP and the rest are hidden (this isn't always the case as sometimes it shows 4 or 5 pages for a given domain but they are almost always grouped together).

Since the related pages for each domain show up grouped together in the original SERP, is google using domain authority to determine ranking for the collection of pages, or is it ranking the entire set of pages for the domain based on the one page it chose to display in the SERP?

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Showing more results from a domain.

Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site:

Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.

We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year. We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.

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Glad to see an official article detailing it. Since they're applying this to eCommerce Products, do you think they're using a single page on the domain to determine ranking, or the entire domain's authority on the category related to that product? I'm open to a purely speculative answer if you're willing to give it. Thanks! – JMC Jul 15 '11 at 20:49
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For them to let one site dominate the first page of search results it's almost certainly based on the whole domain. I'm be stunned if one or two "authoritative" pages were enough to earn that kind of exposure. – John Conde♦ Jul 15 '11 at 20:50
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I agree. Amazon gets a lot of exposure on organic search even on products they don't sell directly where there's very little info on the page. – JMC Jul 15 '11 at 20:58

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