Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Of course, that's only counting internal factors -- A bigger site may draw more and more-varied incoming links, also a ranking factor.
Jim
Certainly 30 to 50 pages can do very well, I have seen that many times.
You do need to make sure that your title and meta description, headings, URL structure, canonicalisation, code, and so on, are all top-notch in order to squeeze everything you can out of the site.
...without using the keywords as anchor text in links from other sites...
gouri - I'm not understanding what you're saying here. Clarification, please.
I know of some less-than-ten page sites, btw, that are doing very well in competitive areas, but not for a wide variety of phrases. Also, I don't think their success could be reproduced today.
I mean that the sites are ranking for certain keywords but those keywords are not used as anchor text in backlinks to the sites? Does this help?
I think now that I understand what you're asking, but I don't understand why.
For anything competitive in Google, good inbound anchor text is absolutely necessary for a page to rank well, and to stay ranked well. It's a fundamental part of Google's algorithm.
Some pages might rank well for long tail phrases, but generally you need anchor text boosting at least one or more of the words in the phrase.
I don't know why this question is being piggy-backed onto a question about the size of the site, btw... unless you're asking about the difference between the effects of internal navigation anchor text and external inbound anchor text. Even on large sites with lots of internal anchor text, you need some relevant external anchor text from "trusted" sites to boost your pages up on competitive phrases.
Say that you have some websites that are smaller in size but if you have the keywords that you want it to rank high for as your anchor text from links coming from other sites can the smaller sites compete with the big ones?
...can the smaller sites compete with the big ones?
Yes, but for a smaller number of phrases. As I mentioned, I've seen even less-than-ten page sites outrank larger sites in very competitive searches.
One of the advantages of a larger site is that, with more pages, it can have lots of varied targeted content to attract lots of varied links, and thus it can rank for a larger variety of phrases. This assumes that the content is good enough to attract good quality inbound links.
In the 30-50 page area, I've seen some well-made, well-targeted smaller sites pull twice the traffic of much larger sites, in very competitive markets. But size is often assumed to be a measure of credibility... and increasingly, this is putting smaller sites at a disadvantage in getting good inbound links.
If I were deciding now between the strategy of one big site vs a bunch of smaller, more focused sites, I'd go with the big site... but there are lots of factors that would affect that kind of decision, and it's hard to generalize.
Can a small website rank high in the SERP?
Yes, undoubtedly...IF you have great and valid content.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:59 am (utc) on Sep. 20, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
First I wanted to say thank you for that very informative response.
I know that you mentioned that you know of several smaller sites that are doing well in competitive subjects. Are these on the older side? Have they been around for a while?
Also, if anyone knows, ecmedia mentioned that if there is one page on a domain that everyone is linking to it could be very high in the SERPS. Does a homepage have a better likelihood of being ranked very high instead of an inner page or could it be either one?
The best situation is when you have multiple pages that are ranking for a variety of well-targeted phrases.
Ranking *is* page-based. However, internal linking on your site gives you control over the link-text, as opposed to the somewhat 'random' link text that other webmasters, forum posters, and bloggers will use to link to your pages. Because the search engines know that this "random-link-text" will occur, there is good cause to believe that they will give precedence to link text used within your own site.
Also, by profiling the pages in your domain, the search engines can better determine what your site is about. This information is then used to determine "What is a relevant inbound link?" and for which synonyms and misspellings they might list your site in their results. They can also determine --to some extent-- the "tightness of focus" of your site by comparing keyword occurrence across your site's pages, as well as evaluating many other such "on-site factors."
So while each page on the Web is ranked on its own merits, there is a lot of dependence on off-page factors. Having a significant number of pages on your own site linking to each other with targeted and relevant link-text helps strengthen the "off-page factors" of each of your pages, and provides one of the pillars of support for good ranking of the pages within the site.
Jim
It's not the right way to go though. If this is the case, then you're ranking due to a large number of good backlinks. And that means that you're not ranking due to onpage content. And that means you're missing all the long trail traffic that you get by having more content on your site. And that's half or more of the traffic.
So if you're in this situation, it's time to get cracking and adding oodles of content.
