Webmasters have always gone by the rule that the more pages you get indexed on a website, the better it is for Google. Not only do you have a larger website overall, but you can also capture a lot of long-tail search traffic from visitors who end up on one of those many internal pages.
But does Google really bring sites higher or better if the website has more pages indexed in the search results? This is the topic of the latest webmaster help video.Does a website get a better overall ranking if it has a large amount of indexed pages?
Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts said that a website with a large number of pages won't automatically rank better than others. So adding more pages to your site won't help your home page automatically rank better than smaller sites.
However, Cutts said that a site with more pages will naturally get more traffic because each of those individual pages can also rank for their own set of search queries, increasing the overall opportunity for sites to gain visitors.
Cutts stressed how links also contribute to rankings, something that a larger site often has more of naturally.
"Now typically if the site does have more pages, it might have more links pointing to it, which means it has higher PageRank," Cutts said. "If that is the case we might be willing to crawl a little bit deeper into the website and if it has higher PageRank, then we might think it's a little bit of a better match for users queries.
