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Is there a consensus on what is the optimal number of item results to show?  The default install value is 20 but I have seen anywhere from 20 to several hundred items.  I had the setting at 200 on one of my sites and blew through the bandwidth quota after a couple of weeks.  Does the number of items make a difference to search engines?  Just wondering if anyone has tested this yet.  If nobody has I can volunteer to use some of my sites though I will have to wait until I get some more consistancy in my traffic.  It is so variable right now it is driving me crazy 100 hits one day from google 0 hits the next day.  I am not doing any paid advertising just search engine submission and visiting my sites every day and subscribing to rss feeds.  On the positive side I got my first $25 signup credit from one of my sites and I am up to $5.00 in commissions on sales.

Chris

The bandwidth is an issue to calcualte for me as well as the load time. You don't want to lose anybody waiting for to many items to load.

[EZ Affiliate Blog]

I normally I don't like to go over 20 results. 10 to 20 is optimum in my opinion.

I focus more on detailed keywords to return more targeted listings.

Cool,

Wasn't sure how search engines responded if at all to changes.  Since you brought up keywords...Is there a number of keywords you try to get on a site? Or is it the more the better.  I have just over 200 on the main page of my mega sites that I have pulled as the most searched items on Ebay.

Chris

[EZ Affiliate Blog]

My rule of thumb is 25 to 50 to start with... Then I add more little by little so search engines don't see 3000 pages appear all at once.

200 should be OK especially if they are well picked.