In an Office-hours hangout, Google’s John Mueller responded to a question about whether a large site with thousands of indexed pages influences Google’s perception of site quality. John Mueller responded, “No, it’s not a sign of quality,” and then went on to provide more information.
SEO’s Perception of a Significant Site Advantage
In the SEO community, there is an old belief that larger sites have an advantage over smaller sites.
When a smaller site fails to achieve top rankings, some will shrug and assume that the big site has an advantage due to its size.
An example of the belief that big brands have an advantage can be found in a 2012 article published on Moz:
“There’s been a lot of debate about how Google, both manually and algorithmically, may favor big brands…
Since the beginning of the internet, the eventual advantage of big brands was only a matter of time.
This post is about why I think that advantage was inevitable, why it’s not going away, and what you can do to compete.”
It was a pessimistic outlook in 2012, and it is still a defeatist approach to marketing today, peddling the notion that ranking algorithms are biased against smaller sites.
Despite new algorithms such as BERT and MUM, many people still believe that large websites have an inherent advantage.
Remove Low-Performance Pages?
The person who asked the question explained that they wanted to remove old pages that were performing poorly.
However, they were met with opposition from the site’s developers, who claimed that shrinking the site would diminish its perceived advantage of being large.
Here’s the question:
“So you’ve recommended several times in the past that large sites, that they focus on a smaller set of pages, I guess.
…The site I’m working on right now, we have a lot of pages that… a lot of pages… like a thousand pages, that don’t get any traffic, that are old, so I’ve been recommending to remove those.
But there’s a question that our dev team
has that they were under the impression that the more pages that Google has indexed of your site, the higher the authority it ascribes to the site…”
The person who asked the question goes on to say that the dev team is hesitant to remove pages because they are concerned about the site’s authority.
He then asked John Mueller to “shed some light” on the notion that Google considers a large site to be more authoritative.
Bigger Sites Aren’t Always Better
John Mueller debunked the notion that large sites, by virtue of their size, have an advantage over smaller sites.
John Mueller’s response to the question of whether there is a link between authority and the size of a site is unequivocal:
“So it’s definitely not the case that if you have more pages indexed that we think your website is better.
So I think that, at least, is absolutely not the case.
Sometimes it makes sense to have a lot of pages indexed.
Sometimes they’re kind of useful pages to have indexed like that.
But it’s not a sign of quality with regards to how many pages that are indexed.
And especially if you’re talking about something on the order of …1,000, 2,000, 5000 pages, that’s a pretty low number for our systems in general.
And it’s not that we would say, oh, 5,000 pages is better than 1,000 pages.
For us, it’s all kind of like, well, it’s a small website, and we make do with what we can pull out there.
And of course, like, small website is relative. It’s not like saying it’s an irrelevant website.
It might be small but it might still be very useful.
But it’s certainly not the case that just having more pages indexed is a sign of quality.”
It is not advantageous to be large
A lot of this is self-evident, and it doesn’t take much thought to disprove the notion that large sites have an advantage.
I and many of my eCommerce clients routinely outperform big-name retailers.
Some may argue that brands can use their popularity to boost the ranking of their web pages. But, if those sites have more than a million pages, how much “push” do they really have?
We have entered a new era of natural language processing in which AI, machine learning, and algorithms such as BERT, Neural Matching, RankBrain, and MUM all work together to rank websites using website words and images themselves, reducing the influence of less reliable signals such as links.
So it’s understandable that Mueller dismisses the notion that having more pages indexed is a benefit in the current state of search technology.
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