Does the size of a website affect its authority in Google?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: We have a question from Brian Hancock in Long Island, New York. And Brian asks, “How much does the size of a website (# of indexed pages/content) have an effect on its authority in Google’s eyes?” I’m trying to think because I think the answer is basically zero. It’s not the size of your website that determines the authority in terms of, you know, like the number of pages that you have indexed. Instead, the authority is typically determined by the links that we see coming into those pages. And the links that we see in the page rank will determine how much of a website that we’re willing to crawl so you could have a 1 million-page website. And if only two people link to it, we don’t think that it’s necessarily, you know, you got to link to the root page, maybe you got to link to a deep page. We’ll follow a few links from those pages, but we might not find out about the other, you know, 1 million pages. And if you could take just the number of pages indexed and use that, you could get kind of a weird echo effect where, you know, people are encouraged just to make a ton of pages. And just making a ton of pages doesn’t make a website any better. So, instead, you want to think about ways that you can market your site or ways that they can be viral or get word of mouth or buzz so that a lot of people link to it, and then that will typically cause us to crawl deeper within your site. I wouldn’t worry about just trying to make more pages. That, by itself, shouldn’t help that much, probably not at all.

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

Original video: