And I think that's the point here. It's almost impossible to really know for (or at least be able to objectively test) if all things really are equal. Having said that, certainly for me, my sites that have a similar domain age, similar PageRank, similar number of backlinks – everything I know I can control – all rank higher if they have more indexed pages.

A gross generalisation? Be interested to know.

I guess that by judging my all of the comments one thing is quite clear. No single approach works for all campaigns and that the approach should be tailor made for each campaign.

But wasn’t that the point in the beginning?

Gab, I’d horribly argue with you on the point of getting links to a product listing. I’m forever linking to products that I’m interested in on a personal level. Think Geek is one of my favourite spots on the Internet. I mean, who doesn’t want one of these? http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/generic/5d6a/

Got you there! The point here is that if you’re adding content you need to have reason, direction and a plan. Internal linking can be more valuable than external links – because you control it.

To answer the question: “Do you need lots of content?” The answer is no. But then again with so many ranking factors, no one factor is needed (‘cept perhaps an online presence).

I however prefer having more content to work with than less. But each to their own.

IMHO, more content gives you a better chance at doing all of the above *assuming* that you are publishing some great articles. SEOBook & Outspoken media does a really good job of this where their blog posts are well thought out and are worthwhile enough to attract external links. Generating run-of-the-mill content won’t do that for you.

Great content gives you the ability to:

1) Target long-tail KWs
2) Gives you more targets for inbound links
3) Direct internal anchor text links to some really important pages
4) Gives Google some fresh content to keep indexing your site and coming back more frequently

Does this mean that sites with not much content perform poorly in SEs? No. I’ve seen sites that haven’t added any new content in the past couple of years still going strong for their target KWs. But then again these sites were able to generate some great inbound links through other means.

There’s no hard & fast rule.

http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Algorithm-Matters/The-final-word-on-bounce-rates-as-a-ranking-signal.html

There is literally a TON of stuff there on implicit user feedback. We do know they use query analysis at Google, but that’s not really the same as the prob that is IUF…

Point being, start reading more IR and less SEO… it will do you well in the end..