Forum Moderators: open
other times it seems as site size and links does the trick
e.g hotels (travel related)
Google is still a 'page search engine' not a 'site search engine'.
It doesn't even rate 'external' links higher than 'internal' links.
It also doesn't use theming(?).
IMO, Google no loger cares about page size... i have seen pages cached between 10k to 90k ruling the SERPS for different competitive keyword phrases.
The question was about site (with t) size, not page size.
BTW: The page limit is 100k
We have more than 80 pages in 4 languages full of content and many good back links (30+) being consistently beaten on our main term by a site of 6 pages and 3 outside backlinks.
For the life of me I can't figure it out. It could be site age as he has about a year longer than I do (1999 against 1998).
What matters is the number of links with good anchor text, for PR flow and relevancy for a given term. The more pages you have, the more (internal) links with some good keywords in the anchor text. Hence in many cases big sites have advantages.
Tropical Island, I hope you checked the backlinks with something better than Google :) Google's display of backlinks is not reliable.
If the 3 outside backlinks have much higher PR than your backlinks this could be a factor.
From my experience, age has nothing to do with ranking (at least not in Google).
Offhand, I think a site that's been around for 5 years might be a bit more worthwhile (relevant?) than one that fired up two weeks ago. Especially true of shopping sites.
Our own sites are much better than 5 years ago.
but, if, for example, "site A" has only 5 pages and a certain number of incoming links, while "site B" has exactly the same incoming links, but 100 pages - wouldn't the PR for the homepage and the major pages of "site B" be actually *lower*?
After all, incoming PR would be distributed among more pages.
I don't know whether internal anchor text would make up for this in the SERPs?
Laurenz
BTW: The page limit is 100k
If you are talking about page size I have to disagree. I have pages over 140K showing up well in SERPS.
I agree that if you distribute this PR then to inner pages (and only to them), every inner page of the 100 page site will have a lower PR than the lower pages of the 5 page site.
By PR I mean the real PR, not the Toolbar PR.
If you are talking about page size I have to disagree. I have pages over 140K showing up well in SERPS.
But only the first 100k are indexed ;)
- Look into the cache
- What do the SERPs say about the size?
I've checked one page and it's all in the cache.
The SERPS say it's 64K but the page has 65K of images and a total size of 140K.
Aha, you learn something new everyday.
The reason I say this is I build large e-commerce sites from databases. Most of these sites I can't even guess how many pages exist in the site. One that I am guessing has around 200K pages has PR 3 or 4 on most category pages and there are no additional links coming into the site from anywhere else on the internet. Item pages often will have PR 1 or 2.
Secondly, the large database sites generally have very consistant link text pointing to every page on the site. One of the most important off-page favtors is link text, so having large numbers of pages pointing to a page with consistant link text will raise that page in the serps. i.e. 200k pages (all unique and with reasonable content) pointing to the home page with good descriptive link text will help that search term for the home page.
So it may not be that Google 'favors' large sites so much as large sites that have well designed navigation tend to describe the content of each page well. And Google can discover that description by spidering those large sites, so delivers those pages because it has a very good idea of what the pages are all about.
One of the most important off-page favtors is link text, so having large numbers of pages pointing to a page with consistant link text will raise that page in the serps. i.e. 200k pages (all unique and with reasonable content) pointing to the home page with good descriptive link text will help that search term for the home page.
waynedonaho, I would have agreed with you pre Florida. I have more than 180K pages indexed by Google. About 35K of these pages have the anchor text "KeyWord1 KeyWord2 and KeyWord3" pointing back to the home page. No external Web site is pointing to my site with this same combination of key words.
Prior to Florida, I was ranked #1 in the SERPS for "Keyword1 Keyword2 Keyword3", now I am ranked in the 80's. Because of the fact that my pre-florida ranking for this combination of terms was entirely driven by internal linking, I would be willing to bet the farm that Google's algo has changed in regards to internal linking patterns of large sites. They haven't eliminated its importance (as I am still in the SERPS), but they have vastly devalued it.
Interesting, huh?
So far none of my large database sites have shown any real changes in either SERPs or PR. Everything that used to be found, is still being found. Things that were not being found are still not being found.
