More pages or less pages for best SEO practices?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

I would like to know the community's opinion on this. A website with more pages or less pages will rank better? Websites with more pages have an advantage of more landing pages for targeted keywords. Less pages will have advantage of holding up page rank with limited pages which might impact in better ranking of pages. I know this is highly dependent. I mean to get answers for an ideal website.

Thanks,

[EGOL]

I generally agree with George and Nicholas.

I also think that the strength of your site vs the strength of the competition is important - along with the difficulty of the keywords.

If you are going after long tail keywords against weaker competition, then six shorter content pages targeting six different keywords would be best.  However, if the competition is strong and the keywords difficult then one big kickass page will have the best chance.

Finally, presenting one comprehensive article with all of your text and photos on one page is better for link-earning than breaking it up into six short pages.

This is a complex question asked simply.  We could also consider the ad impression opportunity of getting the visitor to click through six pages.

[NickW816]

Agree with George, quality over quantity is whats important. With that being said, the more pages you have the more keywords you can potentially target from your website, so while keeping the content quality high, you want to have a decent amount of pages that are each optimized for different keyword phrases that you want to rank for.

[georgehal]

In my humble opinion I believe it is a matter of value. I believe that a 3000-word page targeting 6 keywords has (and is perceived by google as having) more value or than 6 pages with 500 words each.