When researching keywords, one of the first steps I take is to look at the total number of web pages that contain my target phrase, I realize this is not an indicator of who is actually competing but it helps me to get an overview. Recently I noticed that the number of pages found in the index for one phrase increased dramatically. I can understand a sudden drop due to an index purge... but a sudden increase? Within 2 months this phrase went from 480K to 9M, then 2 weeks later to 58M (broad match). Excluding the possibility of a sudden popularity increase, what are some other reasons for this seeming inconsistency?
Google is always messing with things. Perhaps they were testing including supplemental index pages in the results. Regardless I think this is a rather ineffective way of gauging competitiveness. You would be better off taking a detailed look at the top 10 - 20 competitors for a keyword phrase.
Well google have had many errors recently, I presume with the recent bug of every page containing unsafe things may be related? Hackers maybe trying?
, Right, competitive intelligence is most important, I look at total count to get an idea of total number of pages only, not necessarily to see who is competing. I often find something with 60 million pages but only 100 or so exact phrase match. So yeah, just to clarify that. But I was and still am curious about the sudden leap, I've been checking other terms and see similar leaps, though none as extreme as the former.
Yeah that's been going on at least since Jan. 13. My main site took a dive in the rankings and now pops in and out every few days depending on the number of results returned. Ranges from 200k to 27 million for my main keywords