Traffic vanishes as Google indexes a large number of our pages.

[flocations]

We have a site and 1 week ago 150,000 pages were registered in the webmaster tools index from our sitemap. We were having 450 people a day for the last 3 months. Last Monday we suddenly started getting 4200 visitors a day.

Then Thursday in the webmaster tools we had 457,000 pages registered in the index. The same day the visitors dropped to almost nothing.

We have a total of 4.6 million pages.

We are not Spamming and are all legitimate pages.

Any help please.

[Robert Charlton]

Hi flocations, and welcome to WebmasterWorld.

What is the age of the site? Were these pages all on the site at its inception?

We have a total of 4.6 million pages.

It would take a huge amount of PageRank to support this many pages. It's also unlikely that the content on this many pages could be unique. (PS: by this I mean that even if the content is your own, it's likely that many of your pages closely resemble each other).

Just out of curiosity, roughly how many nav links do you have on your home page?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:21 pm (utc) on June 14, 2008]

[flocations]

We have about 70 links from the front page.

A lot of the pages do have not a lot on them but they are addresses of places around the world. So that they need to be separate pages due to the site makeup.

What I don't understand is why some of the show case pages had excellent ranking now disappear. Why should these go down?

Thanks

[rowtc2]

flocations, read Google Guidelines for Webmasters.

[tedster]

Many sites driven by large databases have problems with either 1) stub pages or 2) boilerplate repetition. See [webmasterworld.com...] for a discussion. It could be the kind of thing that a suddenly deeper spidering revealed.

Another factor might be the stability of your Home Page. Do you use the database to switch out content very often, or is it relatively stable?

[Whitey]

It would take a huge amount of PageRank to support this many pages. It's also unlikely that the content on this many pages could be unique. (PS: by this I mean that even if the content is your own, it's likely that many of your pages closely resemble each other).

This sounds likely. When pages are similar the site may loose their rank and this then contributes to dragging down the whole site.

If this is correct , then you need to look at ways to remove those pages. Other forms of duplicate content can also cause a site to sink and it's worth looking here [webmasterworld.com...] and reading the various threads relating to the subject.