For the most part, the more pages a website has, the more successful it is - not just with the search engines, but in sales and true popularity as well. It makes sense fundamentally. The more pages of content a website has, the more chances there are for a potential customer to find the site.
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From a sales point of view, the more pages of true content and information there is on a website, the more leverage you have in selling the customer on your product or service. Also, people normally don’t make buying decisions instantly and giving them a reason to stay on your site longer increases the chances that they’ll become immersed in your message, gain trust in your company, and remain on your site long enough to make a solid buying decision.
Apparently the search engines favor larger sites as well. It’s not that bigger is always better. But just like brick and mortar stores, it’s the big players like Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Staples, etc that will most likely have what you need when you are seeking an item in their respective industries as opposed to the corner mini-mart or hardware store. I used the Cool SEO Tool from We Build Pages to do an experiment. Take a look at how the positioning on Google for the keyword “toys” corresponds with the number of pages indexed on each parent site.
The trend isn’t exactly identical after the first three. There are obviously more factors or else search engine optimization would be simple. But there are other interesting trends:
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For one, the keyword “toys” is in the domain name of the top three results. Although Hasbro has more Google pages indexed, it does not have the keyword in the domain name. Note that this is an observation, not a fact.
Amazon has lots of pages, but not all of them are toys If you click to see the pages indexed you’ll see that they are for all of Amazon’s products, not just the toys. This is the same with #9 IMdB, the database of movies. This page links to the Movie “Toys,” though proportionately the word “toys” is just minuscule compared to a toy store with a higher overall percentage of pages relating to the word toys, but fewer pages total.
The sites in positions 6, 7, and 8 have more pages, but don’t have the keyword in the domain name with the exception of #8, and have progressively fewer backlinks, one of the other major factors in search engine positioning.
Now onto the sales success factor. Of these sites, which ones have you purchased something from? In my case, I’ve purchased quite a few things from Amazon, but my one single experience doesn’t mean much at all.
The fact that I’ve purchased toys from the site with the most indexed pages isn’t proof for my case, but it is interesting. Does a site get popular because it has a lot of pages? Or does having a lot of pages increase visibility and make it popular? No matter, there’s no argument that the top ranking sites have lots and lots of pages.
So what if your site has only 10 pages right now; that is something that can be easily remedied. It might take some time to grow your site into the hundreds or thousands of pages, but not as long as you might imagine. Instead of worrying about it, just get started on it.
With a page of 200-300 word content written every day of the working week, you’ll have roughly 260 pages of new content in one year. Write two pages of content every day, and you’ve got more than 500 pages after one year. It might seem like a long way away now, but if you plan on being in business next year, you’ll be glad you started sooner rather than later.
A note of a caution; make sure that the web content is truly useful and informative. You can do more harm than good with crappy content by destroying the trust of your potential customers. You know exactly which types of sites and pages have been created just for the purpose of filling up space to try to lure you into the site. A good example of a large site with lots of interesting content is www.yuctantoday.com. According to the Cool SEO Tool, this site has 468 pages indexed with Google (competitive for this type of site) and every one that I’ve ever come across is very interesting and informative.
This site is an ad driven site so the more pages the site has, the more opportunities there are for ads. That’s one more reason to bulk up the pages on your site. By placing scripts like Google AdSense on your pages that produce ads based on relevant terms on the page, or by selling ad space on your site, you can create an additional stream of revenue. If your visitors aren’t going to buy from you, they’re going to buy from someone, so you may as well collect a finder’s fee for sending them.
But in order to really earn any money from advertising, you need to have some traffic. This really isn’t something anyone should think about until their PR is high and their traffic is pretty significant. Otherwise creating pages like this will take up a lot of your time and that’s about it. Call me a pessimist if you like, but I prefer the term ‘realist.’ The true purpose of these pages is to create more opportunities for your potential customers/patrons/fans to find you based on their particular keyword search and to bulk up your site to make it seem more “significant” to a search engine, and therefore boost its search engine ranking.
Now back to how to bulk up your site. There are few ways you can do this, some of which are better than others depending on the individual site. In my opinion, and I’m probably biased, the best way to accomplish this is to hire an SEO copywriter on a long-term contract to produce a certain amount of content each week. Unless you have the discipline to write content on a consistent and regular basis without falter, it’s just easier to hire someone.
What about the cost? Some copywriters charge $50-$100 a page for web copy. I charge $0.10 a word which works out to $25 for a 250 word page of well-researched, well thought-out, keyword focused content. I’ve been a part of a project for a client that wanted to pump out a lot of content really quickly and for really cheap. Though I played a role in this project by ‘proof reading,’ I don’t recommend it.
The client first hired a team of writers from India that all spoke English as a second language to write about a variety of topics for a web directory website. The content was on everything from gardening, to fashion, to dating. I initially though the job was for proof reading but in reality it was to “Americanize” the content. This is a sentence from an actual piece of content I received on the topic of fashion:
The sultanas of entertainment are the pillars of show business who sparkle even more spectacular that the chandeliers that blaze overhead. It is not only about shopping with purpose, there is of course a lot more to in the showbiz that just retail therapy. It may not work everyday on a fixed 9 – 5 routine, but work done in this profession or industry is full time. It involves either some project or ad work. It is all personal style and the art of presenting someone.
It wasn’t all this bad, but every piece did require a LOT of restructuring. For the most part, the content was ok for entry level writers that had no specific knowledge in the topics at hand, but there were some things that just didn’t work. For one, the cultural differences were very apparent on certain topics such as dating. And though most of the topics were pretty good, there are just really big differences in the way different cultures express themselves that can’t be glossed over with spell check.
So though this company got lots of content, was it good content? It didn’t seem to hurt them. I’m not sure what other SEO efforts they employed, but this project was done in April of 2006 where you begin to see the traffic pick up. But don’t be fooled by Alexa daily reach ratings. I can’t get this site to come up in a keyword search on any of the first three pages… then I just got tired of looking. My guess is they dropped a lot of cash on PPC.
Daily Reach
By adding this graph, I’m certainly not implying that all of the increase in traffic was due to the additional content. I was working with an SEO company that did other optimization as well. This same client was optimizing/building content for 4 sites at one time and not all had the same results. Here’s an Alexa daily reach graph from another of the client’s sites:
The fact that this one has less visits isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The first is a general web directory while this one is, interestingly enough, an SEO company. Also interesting is that the first has a page rank of 0 and the second has a page rank of 5/10.
The worst part about this project, and perhaps the corniest yet most important, is that there was no ‘love’ and no connection to the project. No one really cared that the content was good or that a potential customer would want to read it. The content writers in India put just enough effort into it to get the job done. The client intended to bury the articles was buried at the bottom of the page on each of the 4 sites. It was a way to purely work the system and clutter up the internet even more.
Working on this project gave me the same feeling that I get when I go into Dollar Tree. Granted, there are some good picks in those dollar stores, but overall its just a sea of things that have no meaning, no personality, no heart, and are just there taking up space. Like the client I just mentioned, that’s not altogether “bad.”
Dollar Tree Stock
They’re raking in cash and holding steady on the stock market and I’m certainly not, so who am I to claim to know the right strategy for any one business? Maybe mass produced, assembly line content not intended for actual reading is the right way to go. But I personally feel more of a connection to sites that take more pride in the importance of their industry and actually want to educate, inform, and enlighten people with their content.
After all, that’s the real reason why Google gives so much importance to content on the web. Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” No matter how you try to fool Google or work around their system, they always seem to figure it out and keep those sites buried in the searches. The best way to win with Google is to take all of the advice, tips, and tricks you hear from others about SEO with a grain of salt, find out about Google’s utopian ideal of the web, and then build a site that is truly, honestly beneficial to your target audience.
I write and distributed scores of press releases for clients every week without problem. But one that I recently wrote for my own company SEO Content Solutions was rejected by almost half of my regular distribution points. 
