Why Does Google Parameter &num= Matter? — Whiteboard Friday

So why does it matter? What does this actually affect? So the most obvious thing is rank tracking. Like you might be interested in your rank tracking. You’re probably primarily interested in higher ranking results, the first 2 pages, 20 traditional results, and maybe 25 to 30 total results. You’re probably most interested in those top ones. But you might have reasons to be interested further down as well. That’s fair enough.

Keyword research, again, if you want to get a list of every keyword that your site ranks for or is relevant for or your competitor is, then you might want deeper rankings. 

And also the link index. So our link index and others, one of the big inputs of our link index is URLs that we find on Google search results. 

And again, getting more links from Google search results means we get more input into our index. So we have to balance. We want to maintain quality in all of these things, and we have to balance that against the increased cost, which obviously we don’t want to pass on to customers. 

So here’s a solution we have at the moment. 

For rankings, it’s flexible. In Moz Pro, you get the first two pages of results. But if you’re using STAT, which is our sort of enterprise rank tracking tool, then it’s flexible, where we are allowing customers up to 100, and that’s something that we go through on a case-by-case basis. 

But then for our analysis features, so things like Keyword Explorer and Link Explorer, we’re offering 50. So this is basically the same as we were using before in those features, and that’s because in these parts of the tool, which is basically this stuff, we think those deeper rankings are particularly important if you want to look at cannibalization or that kind of thing. 

So yeah, basically, I would advise you to go and have a look at what your tool is doing. 

Hopefully, your tools are Moz and STAT, so I just told you. But go and have a look at what your tool is doing, so you can have some kind of understanding of how this works behind the scenes, and hopefully not, but whether perhaps there might be a cost implication for you in the future.