Is there a relationship b/w total number of pages

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Is there a relationship b/w total number of pages

and Google PR?

sasha

6:09 am on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

This may have already been answered.

Is there a relationship b/w total number of pages on a website and Google PR?

We have a database driven site that currently has about 1,200 "static" pages.

We will be increase the number of pages by 200,000-300,000 soon. Do you think Google would recognize that the site now has more 'content'? Provided the number of backlinks stays the same, what would be the impact on the PR (or more importantly, in this case, on frequency of spidering)?

mrclark

9:00 am on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Yes, the more pages a website has the higher PR potential it has.

BUT, it is possible to be a long way from your potential if your internal linking structure is poor.

For example if you have a 'links' page and this links page doesn't link to your home page, but it links to every other page in your website, it means your home page isn't gaining any direct PR value from your links page.

If that makes sense lol.

Steve

bufferzone

9:56 am on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

The number of pages in a web site might affect PR, but I’m not at all sure on this. Content does, however, effect placement a lot, in fact some would argue, that content in one of the most important overall factors in SEO. My advice would be to go for content and not for page numbers. Good and target content, build around your keywords, and if you end up with a fair number of pages, that’s good.
Another factor that you must remember is linking. Don’t create a lot of pages with just a single link pointing to them. interlink your pages so that every page has at least 3 links pointing to them. This will also effect PR since it tends to distribute the available PR better

mrclark

10:36 am on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Each new page that you create in your website gets a starting PR of 1 ... the more pages your site has the PR your site can have.

You need to look more into the algo to get what I mean.

Steve

mrclark

10:41 am on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Carrying on from what I was saying lol.

You only need 1 page to get a link to it for it to gain a PR, so long as the linking page itself has a PR of at least 1.

As I said it depends on your linking structure. If you link to a page in your website and that page has no outbound links on it it's called a 'dangling link'. Whether Google still counts these as outbound links when determining PR to the rest of the website is an ongoing discussion. My view is that it would count and so PR wastage is happening.

I'm confusing myself now :)

Steve

sasha

2:13 pm on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

We are adding very large database to the site. So the page count will grow. We are not doing this to gain PR. But I am mindful of the fact that the site will have several hundred thousand individual 'static' pages and if it has a low PR it may take Google many months to fully spider it.

If they tend to give higher PR to sites with 'a lot of content' - then it would mean that Google spidering will only take months vs. years.

conroy

2:29 pm on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

mrclark has it right.

Each page has a PR value of 1. So every page you add adds to your site's total PR. Which means you can shift the PR around to the pages that you want more effectively.

mrclark

4:25 pm on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Thanks Conroy, glad to know I'm doing something worthwhile :)

Steve

planit

5:17 pm on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

This is strange because I have a site with 50,000 pages spidered on Google and 2 updates ago I had increased my PR to 5 then it went to 4 with the next update and then 3 with this latest one.

In all of this my serps and visitors have not changed since January

It feels like everything I do makes no difference at all.

phantombookman

6:28 pm on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

I could not say it makes no difference but does it make a discernable difference?
As Planit mentions his 50k site with PR3, I have a 38 page site that was PR5 the other week

The difference to PR of extra pages must be miniscule if indeed existent.
Regards
Rod

BigDave

7:34 pm on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

That is not a *toolbar* PR of one, and it does not necessarily even add up to a real PR of one. In a closed system it works out to a total PR of 1 per page, but each page does not necessarily have a PR of 1.

Yes, the total aggregate PR of the site will be higher, but it will be spread out over 200 times as many pages.

Since all pages generally link to the home page, there is a good chance that it will even get a boost in its PR, but assuming all your product pages are at the same level, you could end up with quite a drop in PR on the individual product pages.

Where it hurst you is that the PR coming into your site from the external links get spread much thinner. This usually more than makes up for the PR thatyou gain by having more pages.

doc_z

8:31 pm on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Of course, there might be an (positive) effect due to additional external incoming links to the new pages.

Apart from this effect, there is indeed an increase of the PR (according to the original algorithm). However, as already mentioned by BigDave, this increase of real PR is not necessarily 1. The additional PR (of the whole system) is just one in cases where the additional page is part of a 'leaf node' without 'dead ends', e.g. a site with no dangling pages and no outgoing links. In this example the additional PR is also only distributed on the own site.

I also agree with the other comments of the previous post.

Unfortunately, Google made changes to the algorithm which seem to prevent 'producing' PR by adding (numerous) pages. Moreover, you need PR to get all pages spidered.

sasha

9:34 pm on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

My primary concern is not the PR for its own sake, but for the sake of spidering depth/priority.

Currently most 'individual product' pages have a PR of less than 1, but it would be nice to gain a little bit of PR for the index page and the site map page after adding 200,000 new pages so that G would come in and follow the links and spider the rest of the site.

I am not concerned with 'ranking' as much, as crawling.

Individual pages currently rank well with 0 PR primarily because they appear for mostly 'non-competitive' search terms.

GeorgeGG

10:57 pm on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Only have 5 pages, all PR 5, 3 of them swap between 5 and 6.
All link to each other and only 1 outbound link.
Hmmmm guess I need to add another page.

GeorgeGG

IITian

10:57 pm on Jun 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

>I am not concerned with 'ranking' as much, as crawling.

I don't know PR of your site but why don't you try out with say 5000 pages and then decide what to do next. My guess is that 200,000 pages will cause more problems than they are worth.
A few of them might be:

1. Most pages may not be crawled at all.
2. If they are not crawled, are links to those pages from pages that have been crawled, not counted and therefore lower the general PR of the site?
3. Even if all pages are crawled, PR per page might become so low that ranking will suffer resulting in very few visitors.