When is my site too big for google?

150,000 pages indexed and home page pr of 5 doesn't cut it

[wingslevel]

This issue used to come up a lot, but I haven't seen it discussed in a while.

OK, my site has 150,000 pages in the google index - no supplementals. The home page pr is 5 - it was a 6 for a little while but its been 5 for the last year. We don't buy any links and haven't engaged in any serious link building efforts.

It is an ecommerce site and there is necessarily some drilling required to get to the actual item pages - typically we have the home page>class pages>category pages>subcategory pages>item group pages>item pages. With so many items, this type of structure is just necessary.

Problem is that we suffer about 1 point of pr dilution with each "layer" that you drill down - i.e. 5-4-3-2-1-0 - by the time you get to the item pages (these are the most important) the pr is usually 1 or 0 (the zeros are never grey bars and they are always in the main index - not supplemental).

OK, well pr isn't everything, of course. There is off page stuff like link text and then on page stuff as well. Problem is I have lots of item pages that don't rank in the top 10 even though they are #1 or #2 on allinanchor, and, IMHO their on-page content is far superior to the pages above them in the serps.

The only real advantage that the pages ranking above them have is raw pr - many of these item pages are about pr3 or even pr4. Visiting these competing sites, i will see that they usually have just a few hundred pages in the index and their home page pr is 4 or maybe 5. Because they have fewer internal pages, their homepage is less diluted and we are getting "outgunned".

Because pr is logarithmic (ie each additional point of home page pr gets more difficult to obtain) - is it smarter to set up more sites with fewer items? Should we join the club and start soliciting links to get to pr 6 again? Anybody want to hazard a guess as to what home page pr you need to support how many pages of content?

[cabbie]

This is a very pertinent question.
Seems to me many webmasters just keep adding pages without doing anything about attracting links to these new pages .With Google's new attitude to crawling, its going to make these new pages difficult to get indexed while at the same time probably making your present pages suffer in ranking as pr and inner anchor text gets diluted.

[ItzFX]

Do you have a sitemap linked on your home page? If not, add it.
Make the sitemap only about 2-3 levels deep. Get googlebot to notice your sitemap and find your items.
Getting the actual PR on item pages would require a bit of advertising, which for a large catalog of items is practically impossible. Try to build off your current item pages that already have PR and link them to related items.

^That's what works on my 50,000+ website, not sure how that would hold up on your website with 3 times as many pages as mine...

[wingslevel]

itzfx - what is your homepage pr and what is the pr on your deepest pages?

[trinorthlighting]

Deep links will help. If you have a good site the links will come naturally over time.

[glengara]

From what I've understood your site is fully and properly indexed, your inner pages come up for their search terms, are tops in allinanchor, but just don't rank as well as they should.

IMO it doesn't sound like a low PR problem, something else may be holding those pages back, I'd get someone who has read and digested MCs take on the BD linkage/indexing thing to take a look at the site.

BTW, when you say "no supplementals" I'm assuming to determine this you're using a search term to bring up the inner pages?

[stinkfoot]

>If you have a good site the links will come naturally over time

Hmm yes well ... Although that is what is supposed to happen it in realty does not. Unless you are a monster brand name site your links will be few and far between. Thus the ranking of your page suffer because people dont know about you.

Marketing on the net is now a waist of money as with the algorythm changes and swapping between algos on data centres you may as well be putting the money into your brand noticed. SEO is generally regarded as a thing of the past.

[Halfdeck]

You just need more sites naturally linking into your site. Also, even if your items page was PR 7, depending on the links going into that page, it won't rank any higher.

[texasville]

It's all indexed and no supplementals? You are way ahead of the game my friend. I would be very, very careful about changes at this point.
But a link building program for your deep pages would probably be the only option.

[ItzFX]

wingslevel -> My homepage is PR5, and some of my deeper level pages are PR2-4 including some of the more popular "item" pages. I've come to expect just one level below my homepage PR as the maximum for an "item" page's PR.

[longen]

With 150K pages its unlikely all are big revenue producers - if you do a sort by the most productive top 100 pages, and then create a mini site map to link direct to those item pages it should give them a boost, plus get some ibl's to the site map.

[Webmeister]

We don't buy any links and haven't engaged in any serious link building efforts.

You answered your own question Bro. Stop creating new pages for a few months and get some links pointing to your home page. Links = PageRank.

:-)