100 content pages minimum?

How bad is it to launch a site before it has all that content?

[dwilson]

Brett's classic post says to build 100 pages of content before taking a site live. How important is that point? Will it hurt to launch sooner and then keep adding a few pages a week?

On all other points than that I'm trying to follow Brett's plan for a new site. It will have LOTS of original content. I've even got a professional author writing a lot of it for me. But as each page requires its own research, waiting until I have 100 of them would be a long time!

Thanks for thoughts on this.

dwilson

[takagi]

It is a general guideline. It also depends on the competition (especially for a commercial site), how competitive the keywords are, etc. If you think you can start collecting links to your page with the current number of pages than you could launch it earlier.

[trillianjedi]

We launched with about 20 pages of good content, but we also had a forum (indexable by the search engines) which got some action and created a lot of pages for us (several hundred postings now).

I would say do what you can and get the site out there. But add regularly.

Brett's excellent posting was the ideal - you have to work down from there depending on your own circumstances. That example is not going to be possible for everyone.

TJ

[skipfactor]

It depends on your site & how many "products" you have to sell I guess but adding some simple dynamic content can get you up to 100 pages overnight.

Google's increasing success in crawling dynamic content has done wonders for my new sites. A quick, single(expensive) Yahoo backlink, 5 static pages leading to dynamic product pages & Deepbot can't resist digging into the session ids.

[vitaplease]

The most important guideline of that thread is to keep on adding content on a regular basis.

More important even, is to try to get inbound external links added (from other sites) on a continous basis to those new pages.

Fresh votes (links) help for Fresh indexing.

[edited by: vitaplease at 3:41 pm (utc) on May 1, 2003]

[John_Caius]

From taking the site live to appearing in the index takes between one and two months. My personal preference is to put up a basic "announce" page and link to it from my personal page to get it spidered. After that, Google will come and spider it directly and I concentrate on building content and ranking. It can be useful to test features, e.g. whether Google can spider your dynamic content format, whilst the site still has very low web presence. Whilst it has no inbound links and doesn't rank for anything, I'm not worried that competitors are going to see the site development. I can see why others would want to hold off putting up the site until it's complete though - I just have personal experience of having trouble getting Google to crawl.

[dwilson]

Thank you all for your comments. Now I feel better about launching as soon as there's enough to be beneficial to my users.

And I will definitely be adding content regularly.

[hitchhiker]

Don't forget, for the first month you'll probably get a free (randomish) page rank (before you've been indexed and PR calculated), so your site may get to the first page of the listings for a while (depending on your category).

It's good to make use of this with appropriate content.

[annej]

I've found that if you have only 25 pages of really unique information packed pages you are off to a great start. The key is if related sites will want to link to you.

There is a huge difference between automatically generated pages or even discussion pages and one page of well researched information.

I think I remember Brett saying something about building one page a day. It takes me a several days to do thourough research and then write a well written page.

If you will be adding new articles regularly think about a newletter. It helps bring return visitors.

[John_Caius]

I built up a skeleton site of just under 100 pages and now I get decent SERPs for two and three word keyphrases, a solid regular amount of traffic and helpfully a regular stream of site feedback with about one comment every couple of days. That's a useful start and I've learnt a lot that's useful in now developing the more complex and interactive user interface behind the scenes. When that goes live it will work much better having learnt from the skeleton site.