Nearly each website positioning instrument is powered by scraped search outcomes. As a way to get extra perception from every scrape—and thus preserve prices down for finish customers—instruments typically use this parameter to pressure prolonged search outcomes on the primary web page, as an alternative of the sometimes 10 common natural outcomes a person would see by default. Moz Professional, for instance, has for a very long time standardized on &num=50 – so 5 “pages” of outcomes per scrape.
This parameter had really been deprecated for a few years, however continued to be unofficially supported. In mid-September, it began to slowly cease working, forcing website positioning instruments to hunt different strategies. Some instruments–together with Moz and STAT–ready another we name “stitching”, the place we piece collectively a sequence of paginated outcomes, 10 at a time, into one longer set of outcomes. There are numerous difficulties with this method, lots of which might be mitigated or prevented, however the primary implication is price, which finally ends up being considerably increased, to the purpose of being unsustainable in lots of circumstances.
This must also be seen within the context of SERP information prices typically growing lately, as instruments are pressured to imitate actual browsers increasingly carefully with a view to get correct, consultant rankings.
