Does a site rank better if it has a lot of indexed pages?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from New York. Leah asks, “Does a website get a better overall ranking if it has a large number of indexed pages?” So I wouldn’t assume that just because you have a large number of indexed pages that you’ll automatically get a higher ranking. That’s not the case. It is the case that if you have more pages that have different keywords on them, then you have the opportunity where they might be able to rank for the individual queries that a user has. But just having more pages doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll be in good shape or that you’ll get some sort of ranking boost. Now typically, if a site does have more pages, it might mean that it has more links pointing to it, which means it has higher page rank. If that’s the case, we might be willing to crawl a little bit deeper into the website. And if it has higher page rank, then we might think that it’s a little bit of a better match for users’ queries. So those are some of the factors involved. Just having a big website with a lot of pages by itself doesn’t automatically confer a boost. But if you have a lot of links or a lot of page rank, which is leading to deeper crawling within your site, then that might be the sort of indicator that perhaps your site would rank just a little bit higher. Again, just having the number of pages doesn’t give you a boost, though. It might give you a few more opportunities. But normally the only reason you get that opportunity is because we see more links to your website, so we’re willing to crawl a little bit deeper and find more pages to index. Hope that helps.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: