Does site size (page count) effect search ranking?

[trideagroup]

If a company has a handful of large sites that function as collection of unique portals into client-specific content (password protected), will it have any positive effect on search ranking to migrate all of the sites to one URL structure.

[trideagroup]

From the user perspective, they really only know about "their site" and not all of the other sites that are out there. I know I'm being vague (confidentiality reasons), but think of it as SaaS where your company can buy access to content and testing material that is only available to your employees. Another company may get access to the same stuff, but it is available only through a URL that's customized to them.

My basic thinking is that if the content is not unique, it's password protected and the user's experience is relatively solid (aka they don't stumble around the URL structure), then possibly the only way a consolidated URL structure could add value to search would be to have some sort of content strategy to increase the publicly available content on all of these sites. And even then we wouldn't really have an inbound linking strategy to these pages as they are really client/employee specific...so we'd be back to producing content for the corporate presence rather than these individual sites. Okay, now I'm rambling but I'd love a general nod if at least my logic is sound. I'd happily take any challenges to my thought process as well! Thanks!

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Site size in itself is not a ranking factor.  Matt Cutts video on this exact topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVOrml7fp2cThe benefit of additional pages is that you expand your opportunity for long tail traffic.  It also brings additional opportunities for links, assuming you write great content, and know how to distribute it properly.

Will it have a positive affect on your rankings?

Depends on your domains authority.  If you have one domain with a rocking link profile, and the others have almost none, then you would probably see a benefit.  If they are all equal, then you probably won't see any immediate impact.  However, if they are all equal, it would be easier to build links to one site rather than 5, 10 or 20.

[Wayne76]

Despite not knowing the user's interest level in these larger sites, you may want to consider the implication of potential link acquisition and the benefits of having them point to pages under a singular URL.

Better yet, would having all the portals under one URL be a better experience for the user? If yes, you'll want to seriously consider this option regardless of the content aggregation.

If you want to provide more specifics, I'd be happy to offer up more concise thoughts.

Best of luck!

Wayne

[DJ123]

The password protected stuff IMO won't help you SEO wise because it will likely be blocked to robots/search engines.

If it cannot be indexed, how will the search engines know it is there?

The best answer is, it depends.  What does your analytics tell you where the traffic is coming from and going to on the sites?