Hi, We have a number of Web sites with up to 100 pages. I recall reading recently that the Search Engines will not consider a site with less than five pages. Is this correct> If not does anyone know what is the minimum number of pages? I appreciate that the more the better. But I realy need to know the absolute minimum for practical purposes.
Thanks

As far as I am aware, it does not matter if the website has 1 page.

My one page site is listed just fine.

Search engines will index a single page site. There are advantages to having larger sites as far as SEO is concerned, but you can get a one page site to rank well and generate revenue.

Search engines index web pages not websites. They can tell that web pages belong to the same site and may give benefit (or take it away) to one page because of things going on overall on a site, but they still index web pages individually.

Vangogh is correct. Because search engines only index web pages, it is good to have a sitemap linking all the pages together. I believe that has been helpful to some of my larger sites with Adsense.

I have one old website that I use to get new sites indexed. The old site has been indexed in the search engines for a long time. By simply putting a link on the old site to the new site, the new site is indexed within a week. I usually remove the link from the old site after the new one is indexed.

1 page or 1 word all you neeed is enought links

I have got pages listed with just title and h1 tags

more pages is better
have more pages gives you more links to your home page always link back to your home page from internal pages

Remember that search engines are looking for quality content to render to its users. And, actually, it doesnt matter if its one page or not. For example, I once searched the whole of the internet for a particular comic book. Then, I found it in a small "ameteurish" single paged geocities site prolly made by some geeky fan.

One page websites serve special purposes.
Also, page number varies depending on the objective of site owner.

IMO it is ok to start with about 30 pages.

You can have 1 page or you can have a million pages. It really doesn't matter as you will still be indexed if you follow the guidelines for each search engine.

I wouldn't say it doesn't matter. There are advantages to having a larger site. In fact my recommendation for most sites would be to consistently grow them.

But you can still rank a single page site well and draw traffic to it. You're just going to be more limited in what tactics and strategies you can use.

Originally Posted by vangogh

I wouldn't say it doesn't matter. There are advantages to having a larger site. In fact my recommendation for most sites would be to consistently grow them.

But you can still rank a single page site well and draw traffic to it. You're just going to be more limited in what tactics and strategies you can use.

When I said it doesn't matter, I really mean that it doesn't matter if you had a 1 page site or a 1 million page site it will still get into Google. I was only on about getting into Google and not talking about what the benefits will be.

I know that a larger site will do much better than a smaller site.

My smallest site is around 50 pages followed by my next site, which is about 100 pages, followed by my next biggest, which is about 1000 pages, followed by my other sites that are all around 500 - 10,000 pages and then my final site which is around 250,000 - 500,000 pages.

I don't do small sites and don't think it is worth setting up a domain just do do one. I can't see why many visitors would really want to return to a 1 page site, but then 1 page sites are not all bad as for some niches they can be rather good.

I had a feeling that's what you meant. I figured I would post what I did for anyone reading who might not though.

Every time I've seen a one page site (or close to every time) it was all about selling something and that something was usually spammy. I don't think most people care about you coming back to a one page site. They're just looking to get you to buy the one time you do make it there.

Hello
That is the conventional wisdom.
Earlier this year we built a 1 page site and pointed a lot of one way links to it: The contnet was good but we never finished the site - No real Title tag ,,,just "HOME."
Within a couple of weeks the site was top 5 in google for one of our keywords and it has remained in the top 5 since since May or June.

So the empirical wisdom is "there are many factors involved in ranking, and the number of pages is not necessarily that high on the algorithm list.

If you're thinking about getting index by search engines, it will index your 1 page websites. There are no minium pages for indexing.

Glenn how much work you have to put into optimization depends a lot on which keywords you're targeting and how competitive they are. If there's little or no competition then a couple of links might be all it takes to rank the page.

There are a lot of ranking factors, but most are very minor. That doesn't mean they aren't considered. Links play a very large role in ranking. And if you got a lot of links pointing to the page it's why your page is ranking well. But if you took all those same links and pointed them at another page on the same topic with the same anchor text in the links, etc, but also wrote a page title with your primary keyword and did some other on page optimization the new page would outrank the unoptimized page.

do a google search for something
724,000,000 results, Top site is one page with one word.

C'mon Matt isn't it obvious. The page has a keyword density of 100%.

And everyone I was joking with that statement. Please don't start running out and increasing keyword density.

I think that site ranks #1 beause of it's domain actually. Google seems to give added weight to an exact match on a domain name which makes sense. If someone does a search for your domain name even without the www and the .com or whatever extension your site should come up #1. In this case the site in question happens to have something.com for a domain.

It does have some links pointing to it and I really doubt people are optimizing for the single keyword 'something' all that much.

Nice find by the way. And it does prove a single page site can rank well.