What is the ideal number of pages to have on your website?
When you develop a site to market your business, promote your ebook or information product or gain traction in your marketplace as we outline in our 6-Week Information Product Profits System, a common question is how MUCH content do you have to develop.
Now that comment comes from the seeming link between large sites (lots of content, lots of pages, blogs, articles, etc…) and how that site ranks within Google (commonly expressed as “authority”)
It is true that often (but certainly not always) sites that you find at the top of the search engines for a given keyword phrase tend to have many pages…but is it the number of pages only that is the factor here?
According to this video by Google spokesman Matt Cutts, it is not purely the number of pages that is important to gaining authority and thus the traffic rewards of being indexed and listed higher on the Google search results…it is certainly more complex than that…
OK, makes sense that Google wouldn’t blindly reward sites or pages based on the numbers – that is too easy to abuse and really doesn’t fit with the ultimate intention of Google to index and rank sites according to their relevance and usefulness to the search intention.
But, there is a very real possibility that size does matter and here’s why…
As Matt tells us in the video above, it is how, how many, and from where inbound links are made to your content that matters a great deal to Google. So, the question becomes, does a 1000 page site that has (over time) gained natural inbound links to 500 of those pages outrank a site of 10-pages where there are 500 inbound links to 1 or 2 of those pages?
While yes, the page that has the 500 inbound links on the 2-page site may (??) rank higher than any single page on the 1000 page site, chances are that the 1000 page site will have a better chance of having all of their 1000 pages indexed and overall, through smart internal linking brought about by good site organization, will rank higher on pages that have a very low number of incoming links.
In any case, there will be much more traffic distributed across a much broader set of keywords which will end up targeting more of your audience in the end…always a good thing for growing your online business.
