Is Google Ranking Larger Sites Higher?

[Garrett]

Dan's API Research. Dan's researching Google using their API (http://www.google.com/apis/), which allows programmers and other technical types to use the Google database for their own creative, non-commercial projects.

Now that you can query Google directly and ask how many pages from your site are in their database (search Google for - site:yoururl.com), Dan's been looking at how the number of pages in your site affects your rankings.

Dan took a group of generic search terms, ran regular queries and looked at how many pages the top ten sites had in Google's index.

Does Google prefer, over time, sites that have more pages? "You see more and more pages indexed on these top ranking sites. The kinds of sites that Google dropped are pretty thin."

Does this mean you should add more pages to your website? I'm sure it wouldn't hurt anything, especially if they provide relevant and useful information.

Dan's study is just one small aspect of SEO though - for those of you who are new to SEO, please check out his excellent introductory article (http://webpronews.com/wpn-4-20030502OvercomeYourSearchEngineFear.html).

Is anyone else researching this? Please post your observations here.

[fathom]

Quite reasonable I would add.

If you looked at the attributes that assist in producing higher than average ranks you will see in "larger sites"

1. more content

2. more internal links

3. more titles

4. more headers H Tags, and so on.

All of these helps to produce one other ranking necessity -- more external links... as the more pages you have -- broadens your ability to cater, or appeal to someone looking for content to link to or looking for a linking partner.

Honestly though - without looking -- would you prefer a 1 pager site - or a large site to cover all your needs in a particular subject area... I know what I would lend to... it makes perfect sense.

[Mel]

It has been my experience that Googles algorithm has always favored larger sites. They have more content to rank, more internal links and generally cover all aspects of a subject more throughly.

[mediahound]

I noticed thin one page sites that had very high rankings get dropped as well.
These were highly optimized pages that still fare quite well in other engines such as MSN that fell off the face of the results.

So its back to the drawing board. I had a feeling that it had to do with the internal links not being there. It's nice to see talk on this topic and that I'm not alone in my assumptions.

See ya'll on the ballfield.

- Jarred

[Don Lee]

Every new site I create, I try to create as many internal pages as possible all linked to each other. I find that this method gives the new site a quicker rise in PR.

[coder]

I tend to agree with whats being said about large sites, but a contradiction to that is http://snowflakes.lookandfeel.com/
search either flake or snowflake and it's #1 with only a couple pages, however those couple pages get a ton of traffic and incoming links.

same thing with
http://www.maylin.net/Fireworks.html
with fireworks.

Just playing devils advocate

[spidermonkey]

Those sites benefit from a high number of external IBL's - which is a separate issue.

Any IBL to a webpage from another webpage will benefit the page it points to - including links from pages within your own site - so lots of pages can be turned-into lots of links. Large sites are given preferential treatment in the serps particularly for that reason IMO.

Kind regards

Mike

[Ed Stockdale]

I'd agree, size does help but isn't essential.

[coder]

spidermonkey that's what i'm saying. You don't need a large site if you have an anundance of IBL's.

And in those 2 examples the in bound links outweigh the large sites.

[ppayne]

I like to hear this, since my site (http://www.jastusa.com) is huge, with tons of products. We do pretty well for the keywords we aim for (names of anime, names of Japanese actresses, etc. which tend to be pretty specific). And come to think of it, we don't do nearly as well with our smaller sites.