SEO Tip #41: Does the size of a website affect its authority in Google?
Matt Cutts: I think the answer is basically zero.
It’s not the size of your website that determines the authority in terms of the number of pages that you have indexed. Instead the authority is typically determined by the links that we see coming into those pages and the links that we see in the PageRank will determine how much of a website that we’re willing to crawl.
You could have a 1 million page website and if only two people link to it we don’t think that it’s necessarily, you know that you have a link to the root page, maybe you have a link to a deep page, we’ll follow a few links from those pages, but we might not find out about the other 1 million pages.
And if you could take just the number of pages indexed and use that you could get kind of a weird echo effect where people are encouraged just to make a ton of pages. And just making a ton of pages doesn’t make a website any better.
So instead you want to think about ways that you can market your site or ways that they can be viral or get word of mouth or buzz so that a lot of people link to it. Then that will typically cause us to crawl deeper within your site. I wouldn’t worry about just trying to make more pages. That by itself shouldn’t help that much, probably not at all.
About the Author
Andy Johnson has been on the Internet since the its dawn(ie his first computer program was recorded on cassette tape) and his first hard drive cost about as much his current MacBook. His first byline was in 1993 for a local newspaper rag he eventually helmed, and his last “real job” was at a computer start up which ended when it ended. Throughout it all he’s freelanced and blogged. Now he is mesmerized by Search Engine Optimization forever trying to “rise to the top” for the right reasons. He’s been married to his wife Julia for as long as he can remember and has two lovely, wonderful children. He looks forward to sharing the latest in the technical best for all the online entrepreneurs.