Depends on too many factors to list. Let me just say that quantity does not equal traffic.

Well if the site is very small people may just memorise the content and not return. I identify four main factors:
Informative - are there enough people who want this information?
Stability - does the required content change so that people will keep coming back?
Freshness - are you keeping it up to date?
Breadth - are you covering enough of the topic to hold your visitors?

Of these only breadth of information is linked to site size.

I think we've all heard at one point or another that size does not matter it's what you do with it that counts.

What are you doing to your site to deserve serious traffic? and what are you doing to make people aware of your site?

If you put quality over quantity and do your very best to make people aware of the quality content on your site the serious traffic will surely follow.

I am relieved to hear people saying that quality is rewarded, an to my surprise, the sites are sprouting inbound links I had no idea about till I saw them in Yahoo explorer.

Not much unsolicited linking in happened with the web apps

And no, tis not the site in my signature, thats just my hobby, might be a titan oneday :)

Writing or buying/comissioning content, seo, link building all demand a lot of energy and reasources, so far i am doing a bit of this and a bit of that and wondering uneasily whether tis best to focus on just one aspect till a point in time.

Yet I know of TBPR 4 sites that got scant traffic as the owners had little content

and sites with massive presence in google index rewarded with very little traffic

and some sites just seem to get it just right

[edited by: centime at 4:52 pm (utc) on July 6, 2009]

I beg to differ here size does matter and matters a bunch.

Most of all sites get hits from long tail searches that comes from content or pages within a site. If I only had 10 pages then this greatly reduces my traffic through long tail searches.I have 2500 pages and can qualify or have the ability to get hits from the content within the 2500 pages as well as the tough competitive single and 2 worded phrases that we most all go after.

Now I am not saying to build pages for the sake of it but adding more fresh content if at all possible on a daily basis is one key to building a site. Matter of fact if ya remeber Matt suggested 1 page a day was a good thing for a site to do as it builds trust, links, and the ability to get those long tail hits.

Hi Bwnbwn

this site with 2500 page, could you say what kinda traffic it gets per month in terms of say Google analytics style visitors?

And traffic wise, do yo think one site with 2500 pages of top content, in one niche would do better than 10 sites of 250 pages each, in 10 distinct, different niches.

I.e . do sites get to a place where they achieve critical take off mass, escalating inbound links, fame, recommendations, ,,,

centime just having 2500 pages doesn't mean I will get hits or long tail hits as there are 100's of factors that now come into play that is required for a site to get G, Y or M to spider deeper into the site and index the interior pages. Not going to go into them as most should be well aware what it takes to get spidered deep within the site. Taking this into account the 2500 page site gets 110k a month in hits, then again I have a site with 5000 pages that only gets 3k.

As stated already the number of pages means nothing without proper work in getting the bots to dive deeper into a site. You can have the best content in the world but if it can't be found how will it ever be possible to get the links required to rank.

As far as the number of sites 1 verses 10 this all depends on the time you have to work the sites 1 site is easer to focus on than 10. But 10 is better if you have the time to diversify your portfolio so all your eggs aren't in one basket, but this is what you need to determine as it takes a ton of work to get 1 site to rank let alone 10.

Thats great info Bwnbwn,

Do people find wordpress to be a decent cms for large sites

I find that google indexes very quickly, hours infact, but I wonder about the navigation set up,