Does Site Size Influence Rank?

[kchandler]

The Scenario:
Currently one of my clients has 7-8 products that they sell on their website. For each product they have two different pages one with the product info and one with a video demo. So the pages began to split their authority as they began receiving new links. Since only one of the two pages for each product rank i suggested that we combine the two and redirect the video page to the product page to increases it's authority and rank.

The Clients Response:
After explaining my reasoning and next steps the client mentioned that he thought a site's size was a ranking factor. I had never heard of this before so i told them i would do some research to prove my point, after a little digging around i am now even more confused.

• http://www.seroundtable.com/google-size-ranking-17044.html
• http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4591155.htm

The Question:
Does a websites size/amount of content indexed in Google actually effect your sites ability to rank?

I look forward to everyones feedback, thanks

• Kyle

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Sounds like a very well reasoned response. Thanks for the follow up!

[kchandler]

Thanks for the input Cyrus!

If your interested, here is what ended up happening:
It turned out that my colleague, the person who was pressuring me to find the research,  had read some hubspot powerpoints that talked about the size of your website and how much inbound traffic you can receive, rather than the size of your website being a ranking factor. So this was my response back:

It sounds like we are both trying to answer a slightly different question. I was looking for “Does a site’s size determine its ability to rank in search engines". You were looking for “Does a site’s size effect the amount of traffic it receives”

While they both seem very similar they are quite different. In regards to a site’s size being a ranking factor I would disagree. A site’s ability to rank for a given term is based on its external linking factors, social mentions and on-page targeting. This is why even smaller websites and companies can be competitive for individual keyword terms. However I would completely agree that a site’s size does give you a better opportunity to gain more overall traffic because there is more content to be indexed in search engines and shared across social networks, blogs, directories, etc..

In the end they decided to take the suggestion and combine the product and demo pages to help increase their page's authority and in turn its ranking position.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

I'm unaware of any study that shows increased website size has a positive effect on rankings. Lot's of spam sites have over 1,000,000 pages, in the vain attempt to rank for anything, but it doesn't seem to help them. That said, there are some secondary consideration that size brings with it.

For example, large sites may have indexation problems if they don't have enough PageRank/Authority for a full crawl.

Conversely, large site will often contain more content, thereby presenting more ranking opportunities.

I can't tell you for certain that redirecting the pages will help you, or hurt you for that matter. In the end you should make the decision based on what's best for user experience. But one thing I'm fairly certain of is that there's little chance that site size is a ranking factor.

[kchandler]

Thanks for all the feedback guys!

It still just sounds more like a correlation rather than causation. The idea that often larger sites are doing the right activities to get higher ranks (branding, cross channel marketing, RCS, etc.) rather than the fact that they just have a large site.

I really wish that there was some more definitive research out there other than just gut feelings.

• Kyle

[KevinBudzynski]

I believe it probably does (although probably not a significant amount). As the size of a site increases (with unique content), it may be easier to gain trust and authority. However, quality of content/inbounds links still would heavily drive rankings.

[azu25]

Yes, to put it simply.

The company I work for has several new clients and over the last few months what I've noticed is that the two biggest ones (with more than 10,000 & 15,000+ products each) have exploded in popularity, attracting over 20,000 visitors in the last month since their sites went live at the start of the year. These clients are finding it an absolute doddle to reach the top 5/10 fairly fast.
This is compared to almost a dozen clients who have less than 150 products each and who are still struggling to reach 10% of the popularity of the newest ones, even after a year or more of being online. These clients seem to take 6 months or more to rank for even simple keywords.

Another thing I've noticed is that we have one client who restocks only once a year - as their stock levels go down and product pages are taken offline, progressively so does the traffic go down and their rankings slip.