Total pages for a keyword - what causes the big changes?

[afex]

A client called concerned about Google’s approximate amount of search results for a product name.

This raised a valid point. Why was there a 25% drop in approximate results over such a short period of time?

A few things came to mind, maybe Google eliminated a bunch of spam sites by improving algorithms, or a forum or two got shut down, deindexed or whatever. But I don’t know the cause for sure.

And of course I just changed over the entire structure of the site, so the client thinks that there is a direct correlation between the reindexing of new link structure and the drop in Google’s approximate results. Note: when doing the new site I had a 90% success rate adding 301 redirects to new urls. The sites internal links dropped by 75%, But that 75% drop in internal links only accounts for 10% of the loss in approximate total results of Google.

I didn’t spend much time thinking about how it happened before I started to consider ways of getting the total results to grow.

How can I cause inflation of external content of a keyword or product name?

Maybe submitting rss feeds to syndication systems like feedburner.

Try digging or twittering

Other than that the obvious spamming in forums but I don’t do that.

What do you think? What have other webmasters done to increase the number of total pages about a topic or keyword that they are attempting to 'brand'. Please keep in mind that I'm not attempting to cheat the system, but nuture growth of a topic or keyword.

Thank you for reading, and taking the time to respond.

-- afex

[tedster]

That number has more to do with how Google accepts urls into its index and how it "cleans them out". It's a rough estimate (sometimes VERY rough) whose accuracy is limited by the way Google breaks up or shards their data.

I would suggest watching the number of brand mentions as a supporting metric, and not as a KPI (Key Performance Indicator.) Go about marketing the site to potential visitors most of all, and not dierctly to Google's reports numbers. Take action on those good ideas you mentioned if they also make sense for your site as a resource for the people in your market niche.