Are fewer returned results better?

My site rates better if fewer sites show up.

[larryhatch]

I've been checking G for the single keyword 'ufo' for years now,
just to see how the sites rank. Way back when, there were
8M pages returned, then 9M, 10M up to nearly 11M.

Over the last 2-3 months, this fell way back, in 2 or 3 stages.
At each stage, a couple of million returned pages (as shown)
fell back by 1-3 million. Now its bouncing around 6-8 million.
At each stage, my site ranked better, from 3rd page to second
and now crawling up page 2 (positions 19 to 15).

Sheer speculation: Maybe Google is removing a lot of duplicate
content, scapers etc., allowing more genuine sites to advance a bit.
IF so, this is a highly positive development (copycats excepted.)

Does this ring true with other niches? - Larry

[ncgimaker]

Sheer speculation: Maybe Google is removing a lot of duplicate content, scapers etc., allowing more genuine sites to advance a bit.

So you're suggesting there are 4 million scraper/spam sites on that non commercial term with almost no adwords against it? Not very plausible is it?

[theBear]

ncgimaker,

>>>

Sheer speculation: Maybe Google is removing a lot of duplicate content

<<<

Think for a minute there were millions of pages before and then it looks like there were millions more.

Like maybe the www.domain and non www.domain etc versions all the result of the conaonical page "cannon" that was discharged.

[ncgimaker]

Like maybe the www.domain and non www.domain etc versions all the result of the conaonical page "cannon" that was discharged.

I don't think Yahoo had a canonical page problem, yet it reports nearly 10 million pages on that search term.

It's quite interesting to dig into deep results and see whats happening. For example I notice Wikipedia has a page on UFO's.

So I read it, grab a few major keywords on the subject and try a search.

"ufo luminescent foo fighters"

Google returns 34 results, 54 including the supplementary results. They don't include the wikipedia page in their results at all but do include a log page.

Yahoo returns 34 including wikipedia but no log page.

Are the search results better without the wikipedia page?