Guys, for SEO what search engines give priorities to (with all other equal attributes) - number of indexed pages or number of inbound links? let's say web site with 10K indexed content pages and 100 inbound links or web site with 100 indexed content page and 10K inbound links?
"with all other equal attributes" easy to say, but in real world, when indexed page has 100 times different and inbound link are 100 times different too, there cannot have equal attribute
Content generally wins over links. So, 100 pages of ORIGINAL content with 10 backlinks will be better regarded than 10 pages and 100 backlinks. Anyone can pay a chap in the Punjab a few dollars to drop 1000 links out there. Content is king. Content will always win.
QUALITY content is key. However, google will tell you themselves that they value incoming links. What is the point of having 10k+ pages that no one cares about? Content farms are going to be penalized. Back links are essential.
No-doubt, more index pages are better, but they will be useless if they can not rank & you didn't get any visitors. Here comes the role of backlink which can improve their ranking. But if those pages are unique then Google can rank them only for relevancy. I have a blog for which I haven't done any link building, but after 6 month I got 1500 visits per day only due to uniqueness of its keyword.
I choose index . with huge index it will help google to take our blog on page one . index >> Information to search >> visitor
A site with higher number of indexed pages might have better traffic compare to a site that has high backlinks where you don't know how Google value those backlinks to that site, in fact Google gives penalties for sites that has too many backlinks (flagged for manipulation).