A few moments ago, Brent Csutoras posted on his blog, that Google is showing indented results from a different domain. I hadn’t seen this behavior before, so I wanted to cover the topic here with a little insight.

Before we jump in though, please take a look at Brent’s screen shot and then read the full post and the information he presents.

The most notable element here is that he was able to refresh many times and still get the same formatting of results. When I ran the same search though, I could not replicate the behavior in FF, IE or Opera – both logged in and logged out.

If you have come across this yourself I’d certainly like to hear your thoughts and see additional examples. Initially, I expected to see some sort of reference from the indented site over to Brent’s in his example. It’s become clear to me that Google needs to understand the origin of content, especially given the scrapers out there with RSS feeds running wild. So, my first thought was that one of Brent’s posts was referenced and replicated — and that’s why the indent occured.

Not so.

Again, it’s the first time I’ve seen this, so I’m going to try to look into it further. At the end of the night though, it could’ve just been a random tweak that was let loose as a mistake.