What I mean by this, I went to google webmasters and they were talking about "content" guidelines. How much "contest" does a site need, do you suggest so it doesn't seem to be just a bridge from one "site" to the main / real site? Thanks....
all depends on the type of site, and the manner that you project it in I can think of amazing sites that have pages and pages of content i can also think of amazing sites that are simply one paragraph of an explanation, and some pictures of their work, and a contact form
Not sure myself. However, when I reviewed my site, it seems that the amount of viewable content compared to the total content of the webpage is important. For example, viewable content on my site seems to run around 30% of the webpage while the other 70% is the HTML code needed by the browser to display the page. When I check Google for content problems, they do not find any. When I check Google for number of pages indexed, I find that Google currently indexes about 2600 of my 4000+ pages with more being added to the index every day. When I check Google for top search queries and top clicked queries, 80%+ land on the first page. When potential customers call me, the most common comment is that my site is the ONLY one that showed up in the search. The second most common comment is that my page ranked #1 in the search. Seldom does anyone tell me that I am not on the first page. Based on the experience with my website, I personally think that the more INDEXABLE VIEWABLE UNIQUE content you have on your website, the more likely your website will be indexed and the more likely you will get hits. Images, movies, and the like are NOT indexable even though they are viewable, so they would be part of the page overhead that is not classified as "content" to search engines. Not sure if there is a penalty for a "bridge" page. However, if I used one I would be sure to use the robots meta tags "follow" and "noindex" on that page to preclude indexing of that page and to ensure that the indexing bots went to the next page.
Kind of a silly question, if you think about it. How much content should a book have? How much should a magazine have? A music CD? Geez, it depends on what you have to SAY. These questions about google mean you are building "sites" that have nothing to say, and care about stuff like search engine rankings rather than getting a particular message out. If you are selling cars, you have as much content as needed to sell the freaking cars. If you are dispersing information about breast cancer you put in as much content as you have-- give all the information you have about breast cancer to those reading your site about breast cancer. If you are building a link directory... well sh*t, why the hell would I as a surfer ever go to one of those?? I surf to learn what I want to learn, google be damned. And that's what's good about teh googles... their job is not to see which site is the best at something, or how much content per amount of code a site is. Their job is to bring up sites that have what the searcher is looking for-- regardless of how much or how little. If I want a plumber do you think I give a rat's butt about how MUCH content there is, rather than the content I NEED (what services does he do, does he work in my area, contact info, pricing, nothing else really needed is there??).