Does less homepage content result in higher rankings?

[Garya]

I have been checking many sites in my area. I noticed that the less the content they have the higher they are ranking for there homepage.
sites
#1. has one small sentence
#2. 2 short sentence.
#3. 1 paragraph.
same for the first 7
I also compares the titles pr rank and age, backlinks.

Does to much content lower your ranking by throwing off the search engine to many words, and not sure what your key word is.
The only difference I see is the low content.

What do you think?

[aaronroach78]

There are a few factors you have to take into consideration, I'd say.

Putting crawlers and indexing aside, the site type plays a role in determining the content balance... Is it for media, commerce, a blog, etc.

Loose example, but if you go to something like Flickr, are you going for the copy, or going for the images?

If you go to a news site, are you going to browse products, or catch up on the daily events?

If you go to a commerce site, are you going to read a blog about what the company's up to, or just finding what you're after ASAP?

Don't be ruled by crawlers...focus on what your site has to offer first, what your competitors are doing, and how you can adopt some kind of strategy that reflects what you provide. The value of your site lies there, not by meeting a loose criteria that you think may work to your favour in search engines.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Domain authority plays a very important role in getting a site ranked. You need to check if the sites in question are having great authority (natural backlink profile, social media mentions) in your niche which can throw light for them ranking well.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

There is no solid answer because everything is relational. If you have a lot of incoming links you can do as huffingtonpost does on their homepage and link to hundreds of your pages and a hundred external sites too but if you do not have the incoming links (or rank, whatever Google uses to come up with it these days) you won't be able to stay well ranked.