I’ve blogged about one of the rarely mentioned secrets of Internet Marketing – the size of your site is the single biggest factor in search engine rankings.
The larger the better.
But Google doesn’t necessarily index every page in your website. If you count up the number of pages you have, then do a “site:” you will usually find Google isn’t showing all of your site.
This makes sense. Even Google has limited resources. And why clutter up search results with pages that are of very limited interest?
But it means you need to know something about how Google decides whether to index a page or not.
First of all, any pages which are way off topic are not likely to be indexed. This is one reason why bulking up your software sales website, with weather reports and financial news, is not likely to be helpful.
Secondly, there are certain types of pages Google is going to be less interested in by their nature. A good example of this is a blog that is part of a site. Google is probably only going to include a portion of the pages in its index, no matter how relevant.
If you are in an industry that is highly competitive in the online world, this is worth paying attention to.