Does the number of pages you have in your domain determine a factor in SEO?

I was browsing a site which was giving all the factors to increase your pagerank and one of the factors it gave was to have more pages on your site.

Is this the case?

 

Forget PR for a moment (highly depends on your internal linkstructure and how and where to you gain IBL's)


The more pages you have the broader your apeal to visitors and SE's
E.G. Target two key phrases per page -
10pages = 20 KP
100 pages = 200KP
But just don't create pages to have more pages as this can get you into "doorways"

Every theme or site can be naturally expanded by covering the fringes or assosiated themes.

E.G. house insurance -> content -> life risk -> liability etc etc etc
M

 

I was thinking about creating some tutorial pages on my site about web design etc and some pages on business startup.

At the end of the day I'm not fussed so much with PR as with the flow of visitors to my site.

 

Adding pages very surely increases your site's net Page Rank. Whether increasing net PR will produce better results in the SERPs is open to debate, but if the increase is substantial, it seems likely.

Increasing page count can be done many ways, but one I have long used is to attach an Amazon bookshop specializing in titles related to the theme of the particular site--for example, listing books on "American History" for the bookshop of a site on a couple of history museums.

I have, as some here will know, made available free a whole package, derived from my own original uses, that will do all that on a one-time turnkey basis, producing perhaps 9,000 to 9,500 extra dynamic site pages (but mod_rewritten to look like static pages) that are all reasonably relevant to the site and which change content frequently and with no user input beyond setup. (The package is called, appropriately, "Freebie" .)

I use it myself on a half-dozen or sites, and get nice emails from people using it on their own sites.

 

I always found it surprising how Amazon shows up for nearly every (commercial) keyword and they are always near the top. It can't be because of incoming links to each of there product pages so I assumed the size of the site, many many thousands of pages had something to do with it. Maybe SE's think large sites are more of an authority?

Often when I use McDar's tool, the top ones have hundreds or thousands of pages in URL too. And just the fact that Google shows Pages in URL data sounds like they need that to determine something...

 

At the end of the day more pages on your site is going to make it a more interesting site for regular visitors. As long as you keep it simple it can't be a bad thing... surely?

 

as far as it seeming likely: there are plenty and plenty of IMBD and Amazon pages that show up in the SERPS way higher than they probably would otherwise- even if they don't have much in the way of backlinks and the other pages in the SERPS do.

 

When you add pages to a site, its "overall" PageRank increases by the number of new pages.

BUT, the new pages take out some of the PR of the other pages. It depends on the internal linking structure, but adding new pages will decrease the PR of SOME pages and increase the PR of others (the new pages and maybe some of the old ones, again depending on linking structure). Usually more old pages will end up with less PR.

As a rule, more pages = less PR to most pages if the incoming links are fixed.

That should be countered by the fact that if you have more pages, more sites are likely to link to you.

 

So how do you, nohaber, reckon that affects SERPs then, since that is what SEO is about (not so much PR IMO)?

 

Well, it can increase or decrease SERPs

If you use text navigation links with keyword anchor text, it should help (a little loss of PR, but with added anchor text hits). So it should help the pages that participate in the navigation.

More pages = increased number of potential keywords. That should bring more traffic.

I read in a paper by 3 google employees that basically when the number of pages of a site grows, there's a proportional growth in incoming AND outgoing links. More content should accommodate more incoming links. Google might have some linking score based on these 3 factors: example: for a site with just a few pages it is unnatural to have a lot of incoming links. For a site with a lot of content and incoming links, it is unnatural to have no outgoing links (i.e. hidden using redirects). A site with just a few pages and a lot of outgoing links looks like a link farm etc.

So google might make some "corrections" based on these 3 factors and when they are unnatural, it may "devalue" a site (i.e. by internally using a decreased PR).

So, Increasing content may "allow" google to count more incoming links (if you have a lot of incoming links without content, that might be detrimental and you should add content). However, increasing content without increasing outgoing links may be detrimental.

Of course, just because incoming, outgoing links and the number of pages are considered naturally proportional, it does not mean that search engines use these factors in the ranking process.

 

Thanks, I see what you mean now. Apart from/until Hilltop, I always thought the algo only looked at each page and not to the site. Favouring large sites only supports the big boys IMO and censors the internet in the way that it is hard(er) for anyone with a small number of pages to get their message across. it also promotes creating content for the sake of creating volume instead of adding to the user experience, something which normally means duplicate content (various feeds, syndication, affiliation etc.).

But regardless whether it is fair or not, I suppose it is the way G is going. Size equals power which equals authority and 'expertise' thus reason enough for them to believe they should be higher up the SERPs. (And who knows what goes on behind the screens especially now G goes public/commercial and their one and only goal isn't serving relevant results no more...)

 

Cheers. That has really cleared a lot of problems in my head.

 

Don't despair. If the message is powerful it does not need lots of pages but maturity of a site brings volume. One page a day of good content and in a year you have 300+ pages you didn't have when you started.

That are 300+ portential IBL points.... from sources that may bring more valuable traffic than SE's.

M

 

There is so much fuss over "PR bleed" from outbound links, and the measures that can be taken to stop it (some ethical, some not) that the need to hide intrasite links is often overlooked.

As was pointed out above, simply increasing pages will necessarily add to your overall site PR; but how you link within your pages has a lot to do with which pages gain and lose from that increase.

The simplest scheme, suited for a site that wants to emphasize the PR of its index page at all costs, is to have that index page link to each other page in the site (through multiple levels of the page count is high), and have each other page in the site link to it and only to it.

But that is not, for most web sites, a tenable approach--we want and need things like site directories, and other intrasite links. OK, so we provide all the intrasite links we "naturally" find useful to visitors--but we "hide" them all except for that one link back to the site index page. Piece o' cake.

(There are many ways to "hide" links, but the easiest and most reliable, for now and the long term, is a small php redirect script that is blocked in robots.txt--I have one available free, the "Via" tool, and there are other like things.)

 

I've never understood this fixation with PR and certainly I've not understood why a single page should be more important than the rest.

I'd rather have a 500 page site where each page has at least pr4 thus one has up to 1000 pairs of keywords targeted and each page has some actual value than a a site where the home page is the only important page and the rest is valued as an afterthought, sadly that is the vast majority on the net.

These pages than attract their own inbound links and get positioned so a user looking for blue widget sees a page that actually has blue widgets not a home page that may have widgets and requires another click.

There are less beginners on the net each day and anybody who has used it for a while starts to put in more qualified search terms. No one actually looks for hire car - they all have grown up to look at least for hire car LA or miami etc.
Thus a resultpage that has exactly that choice is going to be favored (by a user) above a page that has generic hire car with a selection.

M
Just my Wednesday morning rambling......

 

PR is the most important SEO factor. I don't know how this "PR does not matter these days" started ?
Outbound links drain PageRank but having no outbound links is just as bad.

 

sorry but have you been off-line for a while?

Again PR is sheer mathematical value with no reflection on content.
There is no hard evidence that it does anything to O in SEO.

Just wander to proogle and see low pr sites outperforming any other pr.

The best example is G homepage PR10 but absolutely useless content.

On the other hand it gives a great insight into the thinking and design of sites on a sheer analytical basis.

Why anyone would proactively request a link from a link page that is 0 is beyond me as it clearly shows that this is a resource page that is bolted on the site because a) everybody has one b)oh yeah lets screw se's by leting them think we have lots of links. The page is certainly not imbedded in interlink strategy or maybe "hidden" and thus is realatively useless for visitors, so why should it be taken into account from an advanced se?

If you want to have some fun just run lynx browser over a typical "links" page, all one gets is about 8 words of text and anything from 40-xxx unorganised links (most don't even bother to have adjusted meta tags).

If I want to search I use G Y or M and for deeper research I use Copernic I never use link or resource page.

M

 

Then how can people successfully SEO when completely ignoring PR (as quite a few do).

I find that a ridiculous statement.

It also suggests SEO is Google only. Big mistake.

 

just happen to check one of ours
g - period pain

p1 - 4
p2 - 5
p3 - 5 (oops ours)
p5 - 5
p10 - 1
p11 - 0
p12 - 0
p15 - 5
lots of grey 0 1 2 etc.
p98 - 4
p99 - 4
go figure....
M

Never said just G. G has the most irrelevant results presently but I don't mind as it drives phantastic ROI from ADS

 

uuuuh and the below site only has 24 links (acording to G) just 22 pages and it's not in a competitive environment as Wordtracker only shows 29 searches a day ...

Funny that, we have 200+ uniques per day (and for a grant I will reveal the conversion factor).... do people no longer use SE's ?

M