Why Your Large Website Might Be Hurting Your Organic Rankings

On-page Factors VS. Off-page Factors

Successful Internet marketers have known for years that people go to the web for only two reasons:  To be entertained or to solve a problem - quickly.  Because of this, I tend to take a "Keep it simple stupid" approach to website design and always use simple segmentation calls-to-action and UVP's (Unique Value Propositions) to funnel website visitors to my desired action while keeping the website relatively small.  I don't want my visitors to get lost in a bunch of meaningless pages that don't need to be there.  This approach is great for conversion considerations, but what about SEO?

SEO Considerations:  Off-page Factors

Since backlinks (Off-page factors) are so important for good organic rankings it makes sense to build a website with lots of pages and high quality content to attract natural backlinks.  People only link to what they perceive is quality content.  This sounds like a really good argument for building a very big website and works well for some.  However, after working with over 100 clients on varying types of Internet marketing projects I can say that the number one biggest challenge for companies on the web is developing true quality content.  Let's be honest with ourselves.  More than 99.99% of the internet is not quality content.

SEO Considerations:  On-page Factors

The biggest argument I hear for having a large website as it relates to keywords (On-page factors) is the opportunity to build keyword-rich landing pages to target specific searches and demographics.  This makes sense to most and can work for some, but consider what those pages do to the overall website's keyword saturation.  When Google spiders a web page it makes a list of 200 or so words and ranks them in order of perceived importance.  After that, Google combines each page's keyword list and comes up with an overall keyword list that is ranked in order of perceived importance.  

Large websites tend to be oversaturated with meaningless keywords.  Those keyword-rich landing pages you thought would do well in search may actually be dragging down your website's ability to rank well for its primary and secondary keyword phrases.

Conclusions

Having a large website is not required to do well organically in search engines.  On the contrary, I've optimized over 50 press releases and 20 one page landing pages with unique URLs to appear on the first page of Google.  Many web development companies will insist that you need a large website and will use a myriad of excuses why.  The real reason they want to sell you a large website is so they can charge you more for it.  Unless you have a PR staff or dedicated PR budget to develop consistent high quality content, having a large website will most likely oversaturate your overall website with meaningless keywords and produce very little backlinks.