[newbie]

Hi all, I have been mulling over something for a couple of days and I am confused to say the least. It would be good to get some advice on the importance of the total number of web pages a site has and the effects on seo.

If you have two websites which are similar in most key seo attributes, apart from the amount of pages, how much of a disadvantage does this represent to the website with the lower page count. Is it an insurmountable hurdle for the smaller website or can the smaller website compete ranking-wise by say having better quality links and more quality content. For arguments sake let's say 100 pages versus 2000.

My confusion is because anecdotal evidence and what I have read on seo forums seems to suggest there in no clear cut answer e.g

• Search engines rank pages not sites so how much importance does the ranking of non-homepage pages have on the ranking of the homepage. I'm guessing more quality content on a website, regardless of where it is, will increase how relevant the search engine thinks the whole site is for a particular search.
• Ray mentioned an example of a one page "cheap boat insurance" site that ranked higher than relevant sites with lots of quality content. In this case the value of the keyword rich domain was greater than the amount of content

I look forward to hearing what people think - cheers.

[SEO Guy]

We are all aware a web page (not website) has the ability to rank highly in its own right. To that end a site that has more pages should do better than a site that has less. Of course this is taking into account every page is well structured, has no duplicate content and there has been a deep linking campaign