How many pages are needed to get top 20 rank?

Newbie question:

How many pages are needed to get top 20 ranked in every search engine?

 

At least 1

I have sites ranking in the top 20 in all engines that have less than 10 pages total. One of them only has 5 pages.

 

and I have a website that has 10,000 pages that does not rank anywhere.

 

How could you get ranked? Could you share your secret here?

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JAVA,JAVASCRIPT

 

Fine, your question is far too general.

'Test' has 250 mil in google.
http://www.google.com/search?q=test...ient=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

'wholesale golf cart' has 2 mil. results in yahoo
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=wholesale+golf+cart&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz2&fl=0&x=wrt

Find out what you are targetting it will be easier to give quality advice.

 

The number of pages your site has has nothing to do with whether or not you rank in the top 20 for a search phrase.

 

I have less than 100 pages and do quite well on one of my sites...
but, the topic is rather narrow so the competition isn't too tough.
Actually, I think it would be ranked about the same if I had half as many pages.

Just another example of what has already been said.

 

Thanks for sharing.

But narrow topic means less traffic?

 

big fish in a little pond

 

A major factor towards getting into the top 20 (or even the top 10) involves inbound links pointing to your page with the keyword phrase you want to be found. Of course, the site page needs to have the phrase on it. There are tons of posts on this forum regarding both the inbound links and the content requirements to get the most out of a site page.

Read on...

 

I have a site in he top 5 (or so) in Y! (local country search) for a popular keyword term. The site consists of 1 page (and obviously only 1 page is indexed), and about 20 words total.

Don't ask me how as I have no idea. So this site ranks well, but another site (which is older) with 4000+ pages can't get more than the index page indexed.

 

onetime only one page put me on the top of google

 

All we really need now is how to overtake the top search terms

 

I have a single page site that im the top10 for the 3 engines, its no.1 on yahoo/msn and no.5 in google and brings in about 100 visitors per day.

So you only need 1 page

 

Fine,

what is your URL ?

but yes backlicks will help you rank with the SE

 

Concur, it's not necessarily a matter of a magical number pages (althought I think any site should have a minimum of five - just me, nothing authoritative) such much as having a few key elements:

Content, Content, and more content to start out!

Good page structure (Solid Title, proper headings/emphasis usage)

Good file structure (file names, directory names, etc)

Good site structure (internal linking)

Good IBLs using text links specific to your content/keywords.

Oh, I should mention Content, Content, and more Content too That's not to say that every page needs to be a doctoral dissertation, but should contain a solid foothold on the subject specific to that page, site, content, genre, etc. with a good "splash" (not spam) of your keywords you're tyring to attrack visitors for on that page.

 

Number of pages is really irrelevant. All you need is one.

 

i think it depends upon the content quality of the website not on the pages

 

In general (everything else being equal). larger sites tend (more content) to have better SERP than smaller websites.

 

That is true. You can rank well with any number of pages, but the search engines will tend to give more weight to a larger site if everything else is equal. It also makes perfect sense. If two sites are equal, only the larger site has the possibility to give you more volume of information. I suspect there are some limitations - i.e. I don't think a 1,000 page site is going to be given more weight than a site with 500 pages. I would always try to have at least 5 or 10 pages to be considered a developed site.

I had a site with a couple of pages and even though it was ranking well, when I changed the registar information to a company name (which looked like ownership transfer), I got sandboxed on a domain I had owned since 1999. "Developed sites" usually escape the sandbox with an ownership change (at least if the topic remains the same) so I think that a couple pages must not have qualified as a "developed site" in the google eyes. I did the same with a site that had 20-30 pages and didn't get sandboxed.