You may think that having more webpages increases your chances of getting better Google rankings. Well, you might be right. Kind of.
This is the topic of the latest Google Webmaster Help video from Matt Cutts.
“I wouldn’t assume that just because you have a large number of indexed pages that you’ll automatically get a higher ranking,” Cutts explains. ” That’s not the case. It is the case that if you have more pages that have different keywords on them, then you have the opportunity where they might be able to rank for the individual queries that a user has. But just having more pages doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll be in good shape or that you’ll get some sort of ranking boost.”
“Now, typically, if a site does have more pages, it might mean that it has more links pointing to it, which means it has higher PageRank,” he continues. “If that’s 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 that’s a little bit of a better match for users’ queries. So those are some of the factors involved. Just having a big website with a lot of pages by itself doesn’t automatically confer a boost, but if you have a lot of links or a lot of PageRank, which is leading to deeper crawling within your site, then that might be the sort of indicator that perhaps your site would rank just a little bit higher.”
Cutts again reiterates that just having more pages won’t get you better rankings, but will create more opportunities for links, which can lead to rankings.
So, the takeaway here is that creating more content is probably a good thing. Just compelling stuff that people might want to link to. Unfortunately, that kind of stuff typically takes more time and energy.