Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I am consulting for a web portal. They have a section that allows users to look up certain information from a database. The company i am working for has bought licenses for the data to create 500,000 (500k) additional pages.
The site already has this kind of information and has approximately 100k pages of this type indexed in google, is over a year old, and page rank 4. It has several good links coming in and is ranking well on targeted search terms.
Would there be any issues at all in adding these pages too quickly? Can we go ahead and add them all into the database and increase the site size from 100k -> 600k in one shot? Should this be phased in over a certain period of time?
I have read that google has a flag that may get set if a site creates too much content at once. I have heard some forums suggest there is a 5k / month limit
I have seen numerous such sites with around 500,000 pages indexed, some with pagerank as low as 3 and some around 1 year old only. So this leaves me to believe that it is okay add these pages in eventually.
Does the google penalty for adding too much content depend on the topic? The site's trustrank. A combination of both? how can i tell if i will pass muster. I assume google knows that this is a particular topic space that has numerous duplication in content.
As the site stands now i believe google likes it and finds it trustworty. I do not want to do anything that may decrease trustrank or damage the reputation of the site. Can anyone give advice?
[edited by: tedster at 7:14 am (utc) on Jan. 21, 2008]
[edit reason] remove specifics [/edit]
I suggest being scrupulous in several areas.
1. Be absolutely certain that there are no duplicate url issues before adding a lot of new content at once. You don't want to create 2X, 3X or more the actual number of necessary URLs. For more, see the Duplicate Content section in our Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.
2. Have a Webmaster Tools account and monitor it daily during the new content roll-out until it's complete and everything is stable in Google.
3. Even then, I'd suggest a stepwise rollout so you can catch and address things whenever they appear to be going a bit wonky.
4. Since many other sites apparently offer the same information that you will be adding, make sure you are adding real value and not just creating a "me too" kind of site. The post in our Hot Topics are about Thin Affiliates [webmasterworld.com] includes some comments from Google's Adam Lasnik that probably have relevance for your venture, even though you are not exactly using an affiliate feed.
What you don't want to do is swamp the existing unique value of the domain, so keep a close watch.
