One SEO professional asked John Mueller in his submitted Question and Answer segment about their page quantity ratio.
Their main question was: is there a good ratio on Google’s side when it comes to the total amount of pages?
For example: are positions of high traffic ranking hurt by many pages being – perhaps 50 percent – of total pages on a domain not being indexed, or being indexed but not receiving traffic?
John answered that, from Google’s point of view, there is no specific ratio that Google would declare for how many pages a site should have, or how many indexable pages a site should have.
This is really up to the SEO professional.
What John does tend to see is that fewer pages tend to perform better, in the sense that if you can concentrate the value of your content on your pages, then in general those few pages tend to be much stronger than if you were to dilute the content across many different pages.
That’s something where John would usually recommend having fewer pages rather than having more pages.
And this plays across the board in the sense that from a ranking perspective, Google can give these pages a little bit more weight from a crawling point of view.
It’s easier for Google to keep up with these. So, especially if you’re starting off with a new website, John recommends starting off small, and focusing on something specific that you want to achieve.
Then, you can expand from there. This is preferable compared to just going in and saying “Well, I have 500,000 pages and I want Google to index all of them.”
Because, especially for a new website, when you start off with a big number of pages, chances are that Google is going to just pick up a smaller sample of those pages.
And chances are that Google might not pick the smaller sample of pages that you actually care about.
This happens at approximately the 28:48 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 28:48
Let’s see, is there a good ratio or consideration on Google’s side when it comes to the amount of pages? In other words, are positions of high traffic ranking pages hurt by many, let’s say 50% of total pages on a domain not being indexed or being indexed but not receiving traffic.
John (Answer) 29:04
From our point of view, there’s no specific ratio that we would call out for how many pages a website should have or how many indexable pages a website should have. That’s ultimately really up to you. What I tend to see is that fewer pages tend to perform better, in the sense that, if you can concentrate the value of your content on your pages, then in general, those few pages tend to be a lot stronger than if you were to kind of dilute the content across a lot of different pages.
So that’s something where usually I would recommend having fewer pages rather than having more pages. And that kind of plays across the board in the sense that from a ranking point of view, we can give these pages a little bit more weight. From a crawling point of view, it’s easier for us to keep up with these. So especially if you’re starting off with a new website, I would recommend starting off small, focusing on something specific that you want to achieve.
And then expanding from there, and not just going in and saying, “Well, I have 500,000 pages, and I want Google to index them all.” Because especially for a new website, when you start off, like in such a big number of pages, then chances are we will just pick up a small sample of those pages. And whether or not that small sample is the pages that you care about most, that’s kind of questionable.
