Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Hmmmm.
More pages ranking gives your site a better chance of being found by surfers and the more pages you have the longer they may stay on your site.
The more content they find on your site the more likely they may be to link to you if they have a site.
The more links you get, the better your ranking may be.
It just all works together to build a better opportunity for better ranking.
I mean, come on now, is Google going to really boost a website ranking just cause it has more pages?
I've never heard that, and i don't believe it.
I agree with Ken, that each page works on its own merits, but clearly having more pages does give you the opportunity to target more key words / phrases - so over all the serps that are relevant, on balance, the site may do better.
And if it's quality content, then clearly it's a better site. But that's not because of 'more pages' for its own sake.
Simply adding pages for numbers sake is a waste of your time, Googles, and potential visitors.
Moving on to the original topic . . . . .
Content is the key to directing your visitors to the proper location within your website that gains you the largest benefit.
If additional content does not attract additional visitors, or directs them to irrelevant content, you lose in the long run.
Unless you are burning through thousands of domain names a year ; )
I've heard this theory and subscribed to it before, but do you really think it matters?
In the old days when Google was young and not so sophisticated, sites could improve their rankings by getting a lot of pages into the index building internal page rank which could be directed to a few key pages increasing their search rankings. But that hasn't been true for a long time now.
However, the main benefits of more *quality* pages are:
- more opportunities for other people to link to you.
- better rankings in long tail searches, which is great for branding.
- opportunity to become an authority in your niche, leading to more links online and offline.
[edited by: Johan007 at 8:15 am (utc) on Aug. 8, 2008]
In the old days when Google was young and not so sophisticated, sites could improve their rankings by getting a lot of pages into the index building internal page rank...
I remember those days. You could do amazing things with just a couple inbound links and a big pile of pages. It was apparently an early problem with the original PageRank calculation. The spammers certainly noticed it, and then Google made some changes and that was the end of that.
I just added a 2nd level page with links to six 3rd level pages on it just a couple of weeks ago. It's already ranking #19 for my chosen phrase.
On smaller sites that I have, it takes months and lots of work to get new pages ranked.
One caveat is that the first site I mentioned has been around for over four years, has tons of traffic and backlinks, and is PR4.
Agree but believe me it can also result in less rank if your new pages do not perform. So it makes sense in theory that more pages can equal less rank otherwise we would all be using the same domains :-)
Interesting, but using the same domain would give you irrelevant content all massed together, don't think that would sit well! :)
I guess the original thinking was that Google (or any other search engine) might consider a larger site to be more "trustworthy". Don't know if this is still true :)
CWebguy :)
I have seen this for WebmasterWorld, too...
I also agree that more content means more opportunities to target different keywords, be found by more web surfers, and provide more opportunities to be linked to from outside sources. So in the short, yes, it does help.
I have no proof to back this up (of course, what proof is there about anything regarding Google?), but I've noticed that new pages on an established large site seem to rank well more quickly.
IMHO, as long as the content is unique and valuable then more content does boost rankings. It does seem that authority sites get more of a boost than non-authority sites. But then again, we're all aware that there are plenty of things the big G considers when giving PageRank and ranking pages, so who really knows :)
