Traditionally, having your site listed on the first page of Google meant that your site had to be in position 10 or higher.  Google is currently testing a change to the search result listings to display 7 listings per page rather than 10.  If this change becomes permanent, it may become more difficult for companies without high brand authority to rank on the first page.

The good news, for companies that do have brand authority, is it may be even easier to rank within those first 7 results.   Current examples seen around the web show that websites with high brand authority can dominate the entire first page.

Here are some great examples provided:

Search Engine Land wrote a post about this earlier, and included the following examples:

The first, for their own brand:

The second, from eBay:

This is an example from the SEOMoz blog featuring “PC Tools”

This also helps raise awareness of your social media profiles by placing links to your social profiles such as Facebook or Twitter in the search for your brand name.  While social profiles appearing in search are not new, this change may increase the possibility of these appearing on the first page for a brand search.  Make sure your profiles are optimized and you have a great social media strategy in place to attract those users!