I search for my name (Ladan Lashkari) in Google every once in a while to see how many websites have published my articles. The predictable thing about it is that the number of found websites always increases... or I'd better say used to increase. A couple of weeks ago, Google found 40,300 websites that contained my name. But now it finds only 537 pages! It's impossible that 39,000 websites have suddenly decided to remove my articles. Does anyone have any idea what's happened? The 537 results found was for yesterday. Today that I searched for "Ladan Lashkari" in Google, it only found 426 pages. What's going on?
If your sure that those 40k pages contained your article earlier then one possible reason could be, those, now missing sites/pages used your article via rss feeds which would have been replaced/updated with some others articles now.
I don't think this is the reason - at least not for most of those websites. Because my articles was on them for months and it's unusual that they disappear suddenly. Yes, you're right. This could be the reason. Then Google has made a big change to their algorithms which will have a big effect on rankings of many websites, because many websites use guest articles so those pages will be removed from the search results. By the way, you have a nice quote in your sig, Exam!
That would have a major effect on a lot of websites. Ladan Lashkari, Does your search results return pages with the same content then?
Yes, of course. Because the same articles have been republished on many websites over and over again. So most of the content on those pages are exactly the same.
That is what exam means by removing duplicated content. Probably google remove it from index to save computing time