Digital marketers are providing more evidence that Google’s disabling of the num=100 search parameter correlates exactly with changes in Google Search Console impression rates. What looked like reliable data may, in fact, have been a distorted picture shaped by third-party SERP crawlers. It’s becoming clear that squeezing meaning from the top 100 search results is increasingly a thing of the past and that this development may be a good thing for SEO.
Num=100 Search Parameter
Google recently disabled the use of a search parameter that caused web searches to display 100 organic search results for a given query. Search results keyword trackers depended on this parameter for efficiently crawling Google’s search results. By eliminating the search parameter, Google is forcing data providers into an unsustainable position that requires them to scale their crawling by ten times in order to extract the top 100 search results.
Rank Tracking: Fighting To Keep It Alive
Mike Roberts, founder of SpyFu, wrote a defiant post saying that they will find a way to continue bringing top 100 data to users.
His post painted an image of an us versus them moment:
“We’re fighting to keep it alive. But this hits hard – delivering is very expensive.
We might even lose money trying to do this… but we’re going to try anyway.
If we do this alone, it’s not sustainable. We need your help.
This isn’t about SpyFu vs. them.
If we can do it – the way the ecosystem works – all your favorite tools will be able to do it. If nothing else, then by using our API (which has 100% of our keyword and ranking data).”
Rank Tracking: Where The Wind Is Blowing
Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs, sounded more pragmatic about the situation, tweeting that the future of ranking data will inevitably be focused on the Top 20 search results.
Tim observed:
“Ramping up the data pulls by 10x is just not feasible, given the scale at which all SEO tools operate.
So the question is:
‘Do you need keyword data below Top 20?’
Because most likely it’s going to come at a pretty steep premium going forward.
Personally, I see it this way:
▪️ Top 10 – is where all the traffic is at. Definitely a must-have.
▪️ Top 20 – this is where “opportunity” is at, both for your and your competitors. Also must-have.
▪️ Top 21-100 – IMO this is merely an indication that a page is “indexed” by Google. I can’t recall any truly actionable use cases for this data.”
Many of the responses to his tweet were in agreement, as am I. Anything below the top 20, as Tim suggested, only tells you that a site is indexed. The big picture, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t matter whether a site is ranked in position 21 or 91; they’re pretty much equivalently suffering from serious quality or relevance issues that need to be worked out. Any competitors in that position shouldn’t be something to worry about because they are not up and coming; they’re just limping their way in the darkness of page three and beyond.
Page two positions, however, provide actionable and useful information because they show that a page is relevant for a given keyword term but that the sites ranked above it are better in terms of quality, user experience, and/or relevance. They could even be as good as what’s on page one but, in my experience, it’s less about links and more often it’s about user preference for the sites in the top ten.
Distorted Search Console Data
It’s becoming clear that search results scraping distorted Google’s Search Console data. Users are reporting that Search Console keyword impression data is significantly lower since Google blocked the Num=100 search parameter. Impressions are the times when Google shows a web page in the search results, meaning that the site is ranking for a given keyword phrase.
SEO and web developer Tyler Gargula (LinkedIn profile) posted the results of an analysis of over three hundred Search Console properties, showing that 87.7% of the sites experienced drops in impressions. 77.6% of the sites in the analysis experienced losses in query counts, losing visibility for unique keyword phrases.
Tyler shared:
“Keyword Length: Short-tail and mid-tail keywords experienced the largest drops in impressions, with single word keywords being much lower than I anticipated. This could be because short and mid-tail keywords are popular across the SEO industry and easier to track/manage within popular SEO tracking tools.
Keyword Ranking Positions: There has been reductions in keywords ranking on page 3+, and in turn an increase in keywords ranking in the top 3 and page 1. This suggests keywords are now more representative of their actual ranking position, versus receiving skewed positions from num=100.”
Google Is Proactively Fighting SERP Scraping
Disabling the num=100 search parameter is just the prelude to a bigger battle. Google is hiring an engineer to assist in statistical analysis of SERP patterns and to work together with other teams to develop models for combating scrapers. It’s obvious that this activity negatively affects Search Console data, which in turn makes it harder for SEOs to get an accurate reading on search performance.
What It Means For The Future
The num=100 parameter was turned off in a direct attack on the scraping that underpinned the rank-tracking industry. Its removal is forcing the search industry to reconsider the value of data beyond the top 20 results. This may be a turning point toward better attribution and and clearer measures of relevance.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/by-studio
