Do fewer pages on my site mean higher rank for each?

[maha]

my SEO tells me:

"Here is a little known fact: The less pages you have indexed in Google the higher each should rank."

that I should delete up my old products & pages so the other index pages rank higher. This true?

[samwest]

It's pretty much common sense to say that having one decent page for red widgets is better than 10 pages on red widgets as that would likely hit the web spam trigger. I would never delete them, just noindex / follow the fluff. I always believed in key word cannibalization, so I try to focus one page on a particular topic / phrase and noindex the superfluous pages / posts. Just my 2 cents.

[lucy24]

my SEO tells me

So many possible responses, so little time...

[maha]

>It's pretty much common sense to say that having one decent page for red widgets is better than 10 pages on >red widgets as that would likely hit the web spam trigger. I would never delete them, just noindex / follow the >fluff. I always believed in key word cannibalization, so I try to focus one page on a particular topic / phrase >and noindex the superfluous pages / posts. Just my 2 cents.

Not the same widget. what about if it's 10 different widgets. (say ipod1, ipod2, ipod3, ipod4, ipod5, etc. spanning 10+ years. Do I delete the page for ipod1? there are still parts available for ipod1.

[Rob_Banks]

Many major sites have tens of thousands if not millions of pages indexed. Perhaps your guy knows something nobody else grasps? Or maybe not.

If you have old products and pages, segment them into a folder structure where you can limit your public facing site pages linking to pages in that folder, but still retain the benefit of long tail content indexing.

[Shai]

This true?

no.

[RedBar]

This true?

No, however do ensure you do not have duplicate/triplicate pages.

Each unique product should have its own unique page, text and images.

[Johan007]

The original Page Rank paper indicates the fewer pages you have the more dilution. This makes sense in the real world because otherwise users would simply piggy back sites under other peoples domain names and pay them rent.

Large sites who have hundreds of thousands of pages have enough inbound links to support having lots of pages.

So IMHO the less pages you have the better these pages would rank... however the more pages you have the more link bait (blogging) and long tail you can target (with SEO and Social Media) and seriously generate traffic. It really depends on you site. If your site has one product/service you want these to be focused however if no one is searching directly for the site then you want to look at the long tail.

[netmeg]

This is 2015. It's not as simple as just more or fewer pages anymore.

[Johan007]

It's not as simple as just more or fewer pages anymore.

I don't toe the official line. Externally I believe there are stronger signals but I do believe Page Rank still one of the highest internal factors along with the <title> tag. But I happy to disagree as nobody can prove either way though I have seen an correlation in my own research with the exception of a few sites.

[piatkow]

"Here is a little known fact: The less pages you have indexed in Google the higher each should rank."

Back in the day when people got in a panic over the numeric page rank this was very well known, It is largely forgotten because the limitations of numeric PR are now generally understood.

There is probably still some truth but PR was never really more than a tie breaker when other factors were equal and it is most unlikely that you could visibly affect the position in the SERPS with this sort of manipulation

There are a lot of good reasons for getting rid of redundant pages but PR dilution is right at the bottom of the list.

[samwest]

Not the same widget. what about if it's 10 different widgets. (say ipod1, ipod2, ipod3, ipod4, ipod5, etc. spanning 10+ years. Do I delete the page for ipod1? there are still parts available for ipod1.

Those would all be unique pages, so I would not delete them. However, (like I said earlier) having 10 pages about ipod1 could be problematic, unless that too was unique, compelling content. Rather than worry about individual pages, I'd worry more about your brand and how it ranks among the 800 lb gorillas in the room. A small brand will rarely outrank the large...unless you are offering something very special to your users. If it's just product re-hash, forgetaboutit...you'll lose every time.