Last year, our soon-to-be-ex SEO company has told us that if you have a bigger site is helps with SEO. Pardon the pun, but does size seriously matter to Google etc.?

Surely it's quality of content over size of site. Or am I once again, way off here?

This post has been edited by Popje: Jul 11 2008, 07:17 PM

Bigger sites tend to have more content and be able to generate more content. This encourages more inbound links and thus SEO. However a small site with great content should to some degree be able to generate this SEO power.

Thanks Jason.

Can I run something else by all of you? It's an idea, but it might not be a very good one.

This post has been edited by Popje: Jul 11 2008, 08:41 PM

This is fairly lengthy, so I apologise now.
Currently we have one large site which incorporates 5 properties - www.maindomain.com

There are also 5 individual sites for these properties - www.property1.com, www.property2.com etc. (Sorry if I'm being obvious here, but I'm trying to get this in some kind of order for my brain too!)
Currently we only have one 'landing' page (for want of a better word) on these individual sites i.e. www.property1.com/index.html

The menus on these pages then link back to the main site where these individual sites have the rest of the pages. Unless someone looks at the url in the address bar, they aren't aware of the domain shift as each property has its own logo.
www.maindomain.com/property1/
www.maindomain.com/property2/
The old SEO comp suggested this to make the site bigger. However, our main site then ends up with duplicate content - descriptions of property etc., which I do know is a HUGE no no for SEO.

I'm trying to persuade the company to go back to individual sites (all of the pages in the one area) with all the info that's needed but with text changes as and where necessary - descriptions, facilities etc. Just how different would this text need to be? Are we talking a complete and utter 100% difference? If so that's going to be quite hard, but that's a job for marketing, not me! (Revenge is sweet)

Is it a bad idea for me to try to persuade them to do this, as it would make the main site smaller.

If they decide to keep it the way it is, couldn't I just disallow the duplicate pages from being accessed by the spiders or whatever, in the robots.txt file?

Opinions/advice anyone??

Thank you so much in advance.

Yes you should stop robots from seeing duplicate content.

There are benefits to having one large site. And that's what was mentioned before. Greater backlinking possibilities, the perception of being an authority in your field, etc.
In some instances, however it is better to break off sites that might do well on their very own. For instance, we often see here at this forum, a web designer's site that has a portfolio of work. Then on another tab, they have tips on how to use css. Since people shopping for a designer will probably never care what css or use a tutorial, that sort of info would be best placed on a different domain. Now this person has two excellent linking possibilities with the ability to garner twice the traffic and twice the backlinks.
So in your situation, you could think it over. Do you 5 sites relate so closely they need to be on one site or would the business benefit by having separate domains?

So you don't mean file size at all?

I'm sorry for the delay in replying Linda!
They've decided to go for all separate sites with new (obviously relevant) pages being added to expand them - it's what I wanted originally. I'm drowning under the amount of stuff to do now. I'm still ensuring that the code (xhtml and css) is web standards - almost there with convincing them to not open the links in other windows (putting little instructions telling people that "if they want to open link in a new window then they hold blah blah etc."). This could work out that I'm hardly ever here now (I hear cheers! ) or I'll be back more frequently (I hear sobbing! ). I'd be lost without the help I get from everyone here.

Cheers

Heya Simon, I wasn't referring to actual file size, I meant the entire site!

Search Engines do like websites with large content but only if most of it is unique and origional.

Sounds like you did the right thing, microsites linking back in to a main site are always a bad idea, and also really dilute (and sometimes damage) your PR.

In terms of size, large sites rank for a wider range of keyphrases, but they don't rank any BETTER with said keyphrases BECAUSE they're big... if that makes sense? So yes bigger sites are better because they pull in more key phrase results and thus more traffic, but they aren't favoured by Google.

To clarify for John (if I may! ), they aren't disfavoured either. Size simply isn't part of the equation.

This post has been edited by japh: Oct 16 2008, 06:49 PM

Absolutely!