Will More Pages Lead to Better SEO Results?

Every website owner is guilty of comparing other websites to their own. Such comparisons often lead people to think that competitors rank better because of the number of pages they have. Do they really have an advantage over websites with fewer pages?

Some websites have an advantage over others because of the huge number of pages they have, especially when it comes to ranking on Google. That is the turf of giants, with countless resources at their disposal to influence their SEO success.

It seems difficult to compete with these giants on their turf in terms of SEO, but that’s not true. You can rank higher than any gigantic website with tons of pages.

I will tell you how.

Let’s Count Pages First

To discuss this topic extensively, it is important to first show you how to easily check how many pages a website has. If you want to know the number of pages on a website, you don’t have to click around and count them page by page.

Say I want to check the number of pages on www.digitalwelt.org. I can search Google for “site:www.digitalwelt.org.” If Google returns “About 889 results,” this tells us that Google has roughly 889 pages of www.digitalwelt.org in its index. Keep in mind that this number is only a rough estimate. For your own website, the page indexing report in Google Search Console gives you much more accurate numbers.

If you are interested in the number of pages contained in the subfolder “/en” of that website — which is the English version of Digitalwelt by the way — the search query is “site:www.digitalwelt.org/en/,” which shows an estimate of the pages in that subfolder.

With this out of the way, we can discuss the impact of page count on SEO and keyword rankings without any inhibition.

Let’s dive right into it.

Big Websites Vs. Smaller Websites

The answer is not straightforward, because Google’s preferences are defined by many different parameters. Google naturally tends to favor websites with more useful content. However, even though content is king, it does not rule on volume alone.

Content can be too drawn out and redundant, offering a poor experience to users. That is why the focus is not entirely on the amount of content available on your website.

Big websites tend to achieve high rankings because they have several pages performing well, which helps distribute SEO value across the domain if interlinking is properly set up. Google tends to trust websites whose pages are performing well in terms of user experience, and is then more likely to start rewarding other pages from that domain.

Advantages of Big Websites

The advantage these big websites have is not due to the number of pages alone, but to the fact that several of those pages perform brilliantly. Having more good pages also gives your website more chances to rank.

The most important advice for ranking well is still to produce high-quality content, rather than simply publishing a large volume of content every week or month.

Quality of Content vs Quantity of Content

Your content must first provide valuable information to users. Then, you can leverage the quantity of such content on your website. A website with many pages should only exist if it is offering its users tons of valuable information to attain higher rankings.

Creating low-value pages with thin content simply to target new keywords will not be rewarded in the long run, and it will devalue your site’s standing as an expert in your industry if users keep leaving your pages. Since 2024, Google’s spam policies also explicitly address “scaled content abuse”: mass-producing pages, whether by humans or AI, mainly to manipulate rankings rather than to help users.

Quick Tips To Improve Keyword Rankings

Let’s look at some of the best tips for achieving higher rankings for your website:

1. Regularly Updated Content For Content Freshness
   Google has an affinity for websites that regularly publish fresh, valuable content. These updates are usually the foundation for higher rankings. Therefore, every website owner must invest heavily in fresh content. I also talked about this in the article “Get More Traffic Using the SEO Fresh Content Technique“.
2. Content Production/ Topic Authority
   Google is interested in websites that focus on specific topics, either via a blog or an article section. Such websites stand out as authority websites and they attract high rankings because they serve as resources for specific topics. Better results are achieved on these kinds of websites once you churn out more content people want to read because of its value.

Attaining High Keyword Rankings

The number of pages on your website alone doesn’t determine your website’s rankings on Google. Numerous pages do not hold any advantage if the content they display is not relevant for users.

Google expects every website and the website’s SEO efforts to show that the content on the website is an invaluable resource for its user base or niche. The first and most important step to becoming a big website is to cover a particular topic with distinction.

Users will become attracted by the value your website presents and all of the relevant information they can easily access. This is what will set your website apart from others that recklessly throw out content across a variety of topics or categories.

More Pages Does Not Equal More Keyword Rankings

Websites with high rankings are often websites with many pages and a lot of content — and this leads to a wrong assumption that more pages = more keyword rankings.

But if you look into it in more depth, you will see that the content and pages are brilliantly targeted to bring value first, before the rankings follow. You will also often see that websites with many pages often only drive traffic through a small percentage of pages that have the most value for users.

Closing Thoughts

The next time the SEO expert working on your website advises you to commit to a content production plan based on keyword research, you should understand that they are giving this advice to ensure that your website hits the mark. Content determines the performance of any website. Therefore, you must not hold back when it comes to content for your website.

Google does not consider small websites that cover only a few topics and aren’t updated regularly to be topic authorities. The quest is to become an authority website based on the strength of your content, which you must update regularly.