Robert_Charlton - 3:15 am on May 27, 2008 (gmt 0)

I know it's unfashionable to think that PageRank matters, so I'm glad that pageone has already mentioned it. IMO, I'm surprised that a PR3 site could have supported 200 pages, let alone 12,000.

But a lot depends on the navigation structure of the site. For a given root level PR value, not factoring in deep links, you can only go so wide or so deep. If, in adding your new pages, you went very wide... ie, added many links from the home page... the negative effects on the existing site are going to be worse than if you'd kept things narrow and deep. With narrow and deep, you could probably just forget the new pages... but they'd at least be less likely to dissipate the link juice you had flowing to your old pages.

Also, I'd bet that pageone is right in thinking that your new pages are most likely thin on original content. Look at it this way... if your site is about year old, you'd need to be creating new content at the rate of 1,000 pages a month. I realize you can create many thousands of pages at the push of a button, but it's hard to generate compelling content to fill those pages at anything close to that rate.

Even if this were a catalog and you were selling parts by number, you'd have a hard time filling it with unique content.

We've been launching numerous sites lately...

With numerous sites, the problem is proportionately harder.