What are the SEO Implications of Adding Too Many Pages to a Website?
When considering adding new pages to your website, how many pages are too many? In the past Matt Cutts of Google has said you probably do not need to worry about adding thousands of pages to your site. But that was 2006.
The introduction of Panda and Penguin updates from Google has focused on the quality of content. With that in mind, will Google penalize a site, or domain, if they add too many pages at once?
In April of 2011, Matt Cutts posted a video that addresses this question (begins at the 2:08 mark). While not specifically saying how many pages are too many, he does state that the answer has changed over time. He also says that if you are adding “millions of pages, you want to be a little more cautious if you can” and that you should launch softly adding “a few thousand pages and then add a few thousand more.”
How many thousand?
Anecdotaly I’ve heard from the SEO community that you should be fine adding 25,000 – 50,000 pages as a time. But with all things Google, it’s hard to say with any specificity what may raise a flag.
While the penalty for adding too many pages may simply be a flag in the system, Cutts has said that Google is working on an over-optimization penalty for sites back in March of this year.
The need for hyper-relevant content introduces an opportunity to develop multiple pages that are both local and useful for the consumer. But for a company trying to add pages to their website that covers multiple locations, with multiple products, and a variety of services there are literally millions of permutations for unique and non-duplicative content.
So whether those are created by a human, or with the help of some technology, would Google penalize a site if you added a million new pages tomorrow?
Have you experienced any drop in rankings by adding too many pages? Have you used technology like pageTorrent? Share your thoughts or experiences below.
2 Comments
Jordan Payne
February 15, 2013I’d be interested to hear more about other business’ experience with PageTorrent technology. It seems like a reasonable approach from a marketing perspective but the automated aspects of this kind of solution definitely has me concerned.
Dennis Jenders
February 18, 2013It sure seems like a valuable piece of technology, and certainly has seen results. I’m always curious to hear about real world examples to better gauge success / failure. And since I’ve written the post, I’ve seen many more technologies come out that can provide generate text that is human readable, and almost appear to be created by a person.
Pretty amazing, although I would still caution anyone on how many pages they generate and roll-out at any given time.
Thanks for the comment Jordan,
Dennis