It has been quite a number of times that people knocked at my door with the question “is there any difference between SEO for large-scale web portals and small business sites?”, so when a friend of mine came to me with the same question yesterday, my answer was and will always be yes.

He was once my student on Chinese SEO and recently, he just resigned from a small company and was luckily hired as SEO project manager for a Chinese news portal.

Here is what I told him yesterday:

We all know the power of links when it comes to SEO, but regarding the scale of a website, we should apply different link development strategies.

For a small business website that has tens of webpages, external links have more power to boost its rankings, compared with internal links. The site owner should look for good link resources to develop efficient link building campaigns.

But for a web portal that contains millions of web pages, the story is different. Internal links are of greater importance to large websites, 90% of whose traffic comes from long-tail search queries. Those search terms are the ones that you may never thing of so it is impossible to build links targeting those keywords.

There are numerous webpages out there, waiting for spiders to crawl, and on a large-scale website, it is pretty common that millions of pages are still “unseen” by spiders even after years since they were created. So to a web portal, better indexation, namely onsite SEO is more important.