One SEO professional was concerned about the number of pages on their site. They have 1,000 pages that are old and were wondering if they should remove them just because of this issue.
Their dev team was under the impression that the more pages Google has indexed, the higher its authority.
John Mueller explained that this is not the case at all. If you have more pages indexed, Google’s not going to think your site is better.
To expand on what John said—you can have 1,000 junk pages and 50 quality pages. The 50 quality pages with great content and other value are going to be better every time. The 1,000 junk pages remaining stagnant are likely not to be as valuable.
It depends on the quality, original research that goes into the piece, the information you communicate to the reader, and how useful it is in your overall site’s picture.
This discussion happens at approximately the 3:49 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 2 3:49
Hi, John. So you’ve recommended several times in the past that large sites that focus on a smaller set of pages… The site I’m working on right now, we have a lot of pages, like 1000 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 authority, it ascribe to the site and are resistant to remove any pages. Could you shed some light on that?
John 4:38
Yeah. 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 it is absolutely not the case. Sometimes it makes sense to have a lot of pages indexed.
Sometimes they’re kind of useful pages have indexed like that. But it’s not not a sign of quality with regards to, like, how many pages that are indexed, and especially if you’re talking about something on the order of, I don’t know, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 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. Then, of course, like small website is relative.
It’s not like saying it’s like 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.
