How can you have 30,000 pages on your site?

a mystery -- how do you do it?

[nonprofit]

I've seen several webmasters on this board write about fantastic numbers of pages on their sites -- 10, 20, 30,000. I've been working hard on our site for two years and I've only managed to add about 2,000 pages to the original 500 when I took over. There is still plenty of content to post--if I could find the time--, but I'm just wondering how it is possible for others to be creating pages at such a breakneck pace.

[darkroom]

a lot of people post articles for each page

[Jesse_Smith]

That's easy. Just make a lot of files. I got a total of 30 something thousand files on my sites!

[rogerd]

Many of the really large sites are database driven, nonprofit. It would be a tall order to hand-create 30K pages with unique, valuable content, at least for a single webmaster. On the other hand, it's not uncommon for a company to have thousands of products, each of which can have its own page. Certainly, there are lots of other ways to get there, too.

[Gibble]

Webmaster world has to be easily into the 10s of 1000s

[Yidaki]

Size doesn't matter! ;)

It's the quality that counts - if you have 2,500 pages of good content, it's better than having zilions of generated "virtual content" pages.

[Outkast]

I have a 30,000+ and it is db driven. I have parts lists and each individual part number (row in db) has it's very own page (kind of) My prob is that the deeper you get in the site the PR drops a point. PR 6 on home, PR 5 page two, etc.

[webdevsf]

2 words: URL Rewrite

:)

[atadams]

How many "pages" do you think Google has?

The answer is: infinite [google.com] (virtually).

A database driven website can have as many dynamic pages as you want. Just throw a different query at the database and you have a new "page".

[BigDave]

Membership sites, forums and archives. My site has about 150 content pages added a month by members. As we grow, we will be adding them even faster.

[BGumble]

3 words: member-driven content

[Jesse_Smith]

This Google forum alone has 11,600 pages! Message boards make it extremely easy to get a ton of search engine listings! You simply let the visitors do the work themselves!

[french tourist]

Size doesn't matter! ;)
It's the quality that counts - if you have 2,500 pages of good content, it's better than having zilions of generated "virtual content" pages.

Of course, but with some given content, breaking the content in myriads of pages is probably a good bet, allowing you to target more keyword combinations :

rather than an 90 kB page entitled :

"Widgets from Antarctica, everything about them"

better three 30 kB pages linking to each other :

"Widgets from Antarctica and their history"

"Antarctica widgets today"

"Widgets (Antarctica) : what innovations are expected?"

[dcheney]

My main site hovers around 25,000 pages at the moment. Its a non-commercial site that is built via databases (but served statically). Each page is substantially different - just a whole lot of content :-)

[kch333]

How Google tell from the "virtual content" pages? If everybody produce content by database, for example, you can produce the "counted seconds since year 00 to year 2000" up to 40G in your harddisk and than upload to website,in your html pages, google would kick it out?

[dcheney]

(I forgot to mention in my previous post that the web site has been developing since 1997 - its taken a long time to build up to 25,000 pages!)

[BGumble]

>>you can produce the "counted seconds since year 00 to year 2000" up to 40G in your harddisk and than upload to website,in your html pages, google would kick it out?

You'd have to have enough Pagerank (ie 7+) to make Google interested enough to crawl more than 10,000 or so of the pages. Common theory is that PR determines how many pages Google will crawl.

[kch333]

Yes, but even the pr7 is established from pr0, if the webside establish the net by million pages autoly, every page just show some number or some random letters produced by computer, nobody (no spider) know this is false, unless people open every page to check.

Ok, I establish it monthly, or every two month, step by step, start from pr2, one day, by this theory, it would reach pr6 or pr7. (as I know, google also detemine it by date)

I guess any website exceed pr7, google would let people open the website to check if this is cheated. ...my guess.

maybe googlebot would find the file name like: 0101224514002546.html .... or aaddjfalkjfexoehiehgoeh.html ...and than kick it out?

[annej]

On these huge sites does every page link back to the homepage? That's the only way I can see that would add PR.

How can we be sure it's a matter of size and not backlinks both external and internal?

[allanp73]

In my case I have spent a great deal of developing content I administer about 50 sites with about 300-400 pages each. My largest (database driven) site has about 2,000 pages, but it took me 5 years to get this big. I too am amazed when I hear claims of 20-30,000 page sites.

[killroy]

WEll my site has around 60000 pages. It delivers content pages for over 10000 sompanies. Category listings and detaily listings and so on. It adds up quickly... Think directories. And each page has plenty of content. After all we have many companies that don't even need a stand alone web site, because they have enough with us.

SN

[Jesse_Smith]

Depending on what kind of site you got, it can be extremely easy to make new files. Just today I created 725 new .html files. Each of them had it's own topic, with unique content, like reviews, images, related links, along with links to buy the item.

[huppy99]

"I too am amazed when I hear claims of 20-30,000 page sites.
"

We have 2 sites, each with 50-60,000 pages. Most of these pages are crawled by Google as they are part of larger scale ecommerce and product enquiry facilities.

It takes some time to build up a database of 20,000 items, but as long as all the items and categories etc are 'crawlable' - bingo. you have a lot of pages.

If they are all bad quality (ie, dont have unique content, specific keywords etc) then obviously there isn't going to be much benefit to your site PR.

We have a solid PR 6 across all of our network sites. I think a PR7 is close. To be honest, I have only done about 3 hours worth of SEO work in the last year.

I think a week's analysis and effort in some better page display would result in better rankings again.

The argument about quality versus quantity isnt as simple as some people think either, I believe. 'Quality' pages (ie, sites with few, but targeted, pages) are looking for traffic from a select group of search terms.

I am targetting many thousands of keywords with our content. So, for us, 'quantity' gets us thousands of search engine clicks per day - and to make each one of those pages better quality would take forever!

[carfac]

nonprofit:

I have a nonprofit, info site. Database driven. It has info on 50,000 different colored widgets. Each widget has 4 sub-pages... and a tenth or so also have user reviews which makes a fifth (or 6th or 7th!) sub-page. So, for me, 200,000 pages is low! My daily average for googlebot is 2000-3000 hits.

As I do njot sell anything, I just get banner income, it is in my interest to split each of those 50,000 info pages into 4 or so sub-pages- more hits, more revenue (still never break even though!)

Oh, and I have a forum now, too! Doing well, in three months, we have 3436 posts in 603 threads!

dave

[estjohn]

Carfac, Why do you only do banner income?

[tedster]

Least anyone think that tens of thousands of pages are a big must for online success, I have a client who has 1,100 pages on their site, with a PR 7 for six of the site's pages, and they are now dominating their industry, online and offline.

And yet all their pages are static; what's more, even though they never executed a linking campaign, the site has over 4,000 backlinks which happened because the content was worth a link.

There's lots of possibility on the web.

[carfac]

estjohn:

Because Banners are the only way I know of to try and make some sort of income off a site that does not sell anything!

dave

[giggle]

I wrote a VB program to generate a .asp script with a unique name for each 'product' the script holds all the database keys and descriptions then includes a standard .asp page at the bottom. Hit a button each time new products come on line and hundreds of new pages are generated. Easy.

I'm sure that's the way most people do it here.

[huppy99]

Carfac,

Althought off topic, there are lots of things you can sell on the net. You can sell information like we do, products, links, crikey, even search terms! ;)

All depends on what business model you want to run. We tried the advertising model, but either the internet advertising industry (here in Australia at least) is not mature enough yet, or it won't be profitable enough.

So we run a few 'traditional' business models with online customers, and a 'dot com' business. The 'dot com' business generates mostly gross profit. Its a unique model that exists BECAUSE of the internet, and couldn't exist without it. They are the ones to look for, and work at!

Cheers.

[HenryUK]

Listings site, with hundreds of registered users adding single data items via a form. c30,000 pages, built with templates but each containing unique content.

All pages indexed, home page PR6.