Does Site Ranking Depend on Page Quantity?
If you want your site to rank higher, you should strive to add as many pages to it as you can, right? Not so fast, according to a new video from Matt Cutts, chief of search spam at Google. In the video, Cutts explains that certain factors related to overall website size do indeed play into your rankings, but that size itself isn’t really an issue.
If you have established your website and are wondering what to do next in order to boost your overall site ranking, taking the time to view Matt Cutts’ video could save you from a lot of unnecessary work and misguided effort.
Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better
The video follows the same format that Cutts has been using for several months now, starting with a question from a real Google user. This time, Leah from New York asks:
“Does a website get a better overall ranking if it has a large amount of indexed pages?”
Cutts bluntly says that having even a huge number of indexed pages will not guarantee that your site also has a high ranking. However, Cutts says that if you have a large amount of pages on your site, this gives you additional opportunities to include keywords and rank for the specific keyword queries you target.
Cutts also mentions that a site with many, many pages also has more opportunities for inbound links, and if these links come from relevant and authoritative sites, your pagerank will increase.
Cutts also says that when Google’s crawlers see a lot of links going to your site, they’ll take that as a signal to crawl deeper into your pages and analyze and index more of your site, which will likely lead to more traffic.
The bottom line is that a site with a lot of pages can indeed rank well, but only if those pages include high quality content and plenty of inbound links. Aside from this, Google offers no rewards for large sites just because they have more pages than a potential competitor that could rank just as highly with fewer pages.
You can watch the video for yourself right here:
