Here is what i mean: Go to Google and search for "discontinued ceramic tile" with quotes. You will get 2,990 results (as i'm writing this) No go to the bottom and start navigating to further pages - 1,2,3...10... Do so until you come to final page, now check the results on top - Results 171 - 173 of 173 How is that possible? I thought there is 2,990 results as Google was saying?! Is this Google bug? Are you still there? Now there is supposed to be the following message: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 173 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." Click on it, you will get on 1st search page and this time Google says that there are 3,020 Results. How is that makes sense? Is there 2,990 results or 3,020?! Scroll to the bottom of the page and start navigating Google result pages again - 1,2,3...10 Do so until you come to final page, now check the results on top - Results 341 - 343 of 343 What?! Now there are 343 results and not 173? Yes, only this time there is no that message: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 173 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." Confusing isn't it? And here are my questions: 1. Do i compete with 2,990 pages or 3,020 or 173 pages or 343 pages? 2. What are "omitted results" - are these pages that Google considers duplicate? 3. Does Google count these "ommited results" in results?
Macavi, its all academic. I have keyword search terms where there are, apparently, millions of competing documents. I'm not interested. Its the 6-8 that are competing for the top 3 or 4 rankings above the fold that count. Forget the rest.
Google's not going to show you all 2,990 results... It's dumb for them to waste time generating links to 299 pages across the bottom of the screen when 99% of users never even click over to page 2 of the results. What would you expect them to do for search results that come back with 300,000,000 pages? Show 30,000,000 links on the page? Not gonna happen. Giving users access to the 4-5 pages of the results is MORE than enough for 99.999999999999999% of search queries. You can see more typically if you change your preferences to 100 results per page. You can usually get to 700 or 800 results before the "cut you off".