For those who don’t know, until recently, if you added the &num=100 parameter at the end of a URL after performing a search on Google, it would display 100 results, like this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=pizza&num=100
Of course, this aspect of the search made life easier for us, especially those of us in online marketing, rather than for regular users, who rarely used this method. And honestly, rarely even click on page 2 of Google unless they really want something.
Table of Contents
When did this change happen?
The first changes were noticed around September 10-12, when it was observed that this parameter no longer worked, either functioning intermittently or simply leaving the 10 results on the page without changing anything.
Google confirmed this on September 18 and basically responded to all the dissatisfied users who thought this was an error, clearly stating that it was not a bug but an intentional decision on their part.
Possible reasons why Google removed &num=100
Two major reasons come to mind as an explanation for this decision:
- Mainly because such pages were often used by tools to crawl large result sets, with impressions being generated in a very high percentage by bots.
- To align with the real behavior of users, who typically don’t go beyond the first page in their searches, and because Google wants to provide what it claims, an optimal UX for real users.
What changed after removing &num=100
Improvement of the Average Position in Google Search Console (GSC)
First of all, the average position changed drastically in Google Search Console for all websites that had a decent number of users and pages indexed both on the first page of Google and beyond position 10. (Naturally, for sites ranking mostly beyond position 20, no major changes are noticeable in GSC.)
Here is how the positions shifted, see the example for these 3 sites:
Site 1:
Site 2:
Site 3:
Sharp Drop in Impressions
There were sudden drops in impressions, especially on the desktop version.
SEO Tools and Rank Trackers Thrown Off
As a result of this change, SEO tools that measured average position and impressions were thrown off, showing display issues for rankings and/or missing data.
In addition, SEO tools will now have to spend more and work on new ways to extract this data. The first thing that comes to mind is that now, for 10 pages, they will need to perform 10 separate queries, and that is where the snowball effect begins.
Can you have a position worse than 10
A client asked me if it is still possible to see positions worse than 10 under these circumstances. Of course! The only difference is that now the impressions coming from page 2, page 3, page 4 will be much more natural and realistic. So for clients, this is clearly a win, their real situation will now be presented in a much cleaner and more accurate way.
