Site size affecting page rank?

[scanlin]

I've noticed the sites that rank above me for certain phrases are much larger than I am. Here are the results of the 'site:' command for the top 6 results for a phrase I want to rank for (yes, I know that 'site' is not exact):

1. 32,600 pages
2. 8,760,000 pages (wikipedia)
3. 684 pages
4. 148 pages (domain name equal to search phrase)
5. 1400 pages
6. 120 pages (my site)

Now, I appreciate that larger sites have more stuff to link to, and therefore have more juice flowing to them from external links. BUT, is it also true that they are generating lots of internal juice by having so many pages? I've looked at the PageRank algorithm and understand that the max page rank for a site (with no external links) is based on the number of pages of that site and how well linked they are).

My question is: based on all the experts here, is number of pages in the site an important factor (assuming good on-page SEO), or does it really come down to number of external links (from relevant sites with appropriate anchor text, of course)?

Can a small site with tons of external links rank above much larger sites? Has anyone beaten Wikipedia for a phrase they were targeting? How did you do it? Thanks!

[G-Force]

Hi Mike,

Here's an other question on the same topic with an answer from Rand :
http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-the-size-of-a-website-a-ranking-factor

Personally, I think it can help, as long as it is quality content that will gather links and that you keep a good site architecture.

I also seen small websites (<100 pages) outrank wikipedia on generic single word queries with a small amount of links.

So, of course, there's no magic formula, it's not all about the number of pages, domain authority, page authority, on-page stuff, external links anchor text or something else.  It's all about having a little (or a lot) of everything to look authentic.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

[scanlin]

Thanks for the pointer; hadn't seen that. I'm encouraged you've seen small sites outrank wikipedia for generic phrases. If you have an example of that you could post, that would be great. I'd love to look at the small site and see what they've done. Appreciate the help!

[G-Force]

I just looked up for a few examples, see attached images.

DISCLAMER : I didn't do SEO for any of those websites and those results were returned from google.CA from Quebec, a province where french is commonly spoken in Canada.

May be the fact that fr.wikipedia.org has lower quality content and lower domain authority makes it easier to outrank.  Still, websites that outrank it are far from being well optimized.

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