Can a Load of New Pages Hurt an Existing Site?

Not sure I've Heard Comments on This

[caveman]

One of our mid sized sites became quite a bit larger two weeks ago, when we added about 500 pages of content...a section we had wanted to add for a while now. The new section provides greater detail and info on a subtopic of our site which was previously only covered by a single page.

Anyway, the site just took a major hit across all pages, and it's a rare time when we've wondered if we were affected by the algo element(s) that some refer to sandboxing.

Any experience along these lines? We were not aware of an existing site being hurt *just* by virture of adding 30% more pages. (No dup issues or anything obviously like that at play here.)

[ownerrim]

"The spam problem has grown out of their control"

Unfortunately, a lot of the spam is adsense-related, which puts them in a weird position. The golden goose is making them a fortune...and attracting a ton of greedy foxes. Of course, I run adsense too. But I also think you should put pages that serve users. Most of the adsense crap I see in serps is simply godawful crap.

[northweb]

Powdork, I added the first set of template pages about one month ago. I was under the belief that content was still king. Although, I'm in a competitive market the pages are still all floating to the top.

The second group of pages were deeper into the site but had the exact same effect. I've added more two weeks ago but they have not yet shown up. It would seem strange for google to penalize sites for growing and deveoping their market.

northweb

[webforgrandpas]

I manage interactive for a small company that targets and elderly demographic. I am new to some of the web master issues.

Does anyone know if you can manage a large change to your copy by implementing the changes a week at a time? We took a huge hit to our numbers when we went live with our last redesign and I have to avoid that this time.

Any tips? We plan to improve about 80% of our pages with new keyword copy but if this is going to kill our hits for 6 months I may leave it out and do a look and feel change only.

Do structural/menu changes effect indexing?

Thks!

[prairie]

I'm not sure what the situation is any longer. With one site I can do what I like (change content, file names, delete sections) and it keeps on ranking, with another if I do the same, it disappears for a few weeks at a time.

Is Google incompetent or are they playing games?

[caveman]

webforgrandpas, could you shed a little light by offering more details about what your redesign involved? Did you change the URI's of your pages? Was it just layout with no changes in site structure? etc....

[webforgrandpas]

I just found out that the problem was in a a bad cookie that the redesign planted on our site. This has apparently been fixed. I am told that the kw optimization we are doing will over ride any hit to our indexing that our changes cause. Apparently, the "key" is in maintaining your keyword density as you redesign.

I don't know what an uri is. I know what a url is...

[caveman]

In other words, did the filenames/URL's of your subpages change during your redesign?

e.g., Did the page at "widgets.com/blue-widgets.htm" become "widgets.com/widgetscoloredblue.htm"?

[TerrCan123]

I would say it definately hurts an existing site to add 30% more pages as it dilutes the existing pages.

I have also added many pages [but slowly] and over time my older pages get less traffic because of it, so it is a trade-off on whether you think the new pages are important enough to add.

I think this is an indication that pagerank is still very important in ranking, sorry to hear of your drop-off though.

[bose]

Caveman,

Have you considered the possiblity that by adding a significant amount of new content, you may have significantly altered/redefined Themeing of your site?

As one expands a site horizontally (across related, but somewhat different topic areas), it is more than likely to leave a topical footprint that is different than it's orginal topical/thematic signature.

I have a feeling the SERP changes you may be seeing following a major content-augmentation could be caused by factors (number of competing pages in that "new" searchspace, overall competitiveness of that "new" sector, etc.) unique to its new neighborhood/searchspace that your site now finds itself in following a major lateral growth.

Obviously one page on "Trangular widgets" out of well over a thousand pages makes your site waaaaaay less "triangularish" than what a boatload (around 500 now?) of "triangular widget" pages would make it to be.

New ballpark, New level of competitiveness?

Just a thought...

[oldskool79]

I do believe it's possible that Google is penalizing sites that suddenly add a large amount of content.

Think about it....most of the adsense/scraped content sites survive by having thousand and thousands of pages. Each page brings in a trickle of income, but overall it's a fair amount of money.

These pages are obviously considered spam in Google's eyes - so they will take measures to remove or devalue them.

One obvious way of doing this is to see if a site has recently added a large number of pages. Sites that meet a certain threshold may be flagged for manual review, or maybe run through another algorithm to try to determine if they are legitamite sites.

Maybe your site is waiting for manual review, or maybe it's being seen as a spam site, or maybe it takes a while for sites to go through the review process.

This, of course, is all speculation - but it does seem to be what people are experiencing.

[Spine]

Has anybody had any luck with this since the thread started in late September?

Of all the possible reasons for my late September drop in traffic, I hadn't considered the addition of new content (or noticed this thread).

I added about 10 or so pages and grew my small site from 90 to around 100 pages in August. Since September I've been stressing and scrambling to figure out what offended the big G (no, not God, Google).

I'm still in the dumps here, lots of irrelevant sites that I consider spam (and some that aren't spam) are visible for both keywords and unique terms that I'm totally buried on.

Has anybody had some good news? I'm considering a drastic reduction in pages (to like, 15) to see what effect that has.

Nothing for me to loose now :(

[neuron]

my prior post was #50 in this thread, where I was worried that I had just added a bunch of pages to a site. The total add was somewhere around 160 pages not 80 pages, and that quintupled the site size.

My fears about being relegated to the sandbox did not happen, I pounded the site with a bunch of unique domain links and climbed strongly in the SERPs within days.

[adamxcl]

I too may have experienced this effect. On a site without about 13,000 pages, I finally added a new 5,000 page expansion that I worked on for a long time. And now, I'm seeing huge declines in rankings. The new pages are actually doing better than expected in Adsense, but others have definitely been hurt recently.

[jimh009]

In September of this year, I added in over 500 pages of unique content to my existing site (which is 4000 or so pages). I didn't see any sort of rankings drop for the rest of my site - and the new pages popped up in G's index in about 3 weeks - ranking well right out of the gate.

I suspect there has to be something else going on that is causing loss of ranking for your site. While I agree that Google may have some sort of "sudden extra content penalty" due to the rise of Scraper Sites, the threshold for the number of pages would have to be significant - and most likely is also linked/triggered to additional factors that we webmasters are not aware of.

A case in point would have to be webmaster world. I suspect webmaster world adds in 100's if not 1000's of pages a day. Yet I've never heard of webmaster world losing good rankings because of it.

As for the "theming footprint" mentioned, that may play out on other SE's but I don't think it washes with Google. For better or worse, Google seems to like multi-themed sites. I think I even remember GoogleGuy mentioning that - that Google likes multi-themed and multi-topic sites. I've added in all sorts of "very loose" themes to my existing site that previously had a tight theme focus. The additional pages added never caused any sort of problems with my sites or individual page rankings. And the new pageas added have tended to rank quite well.

Anyways, just my two cents.

[steveb]

"I'm considering a drastic reduction in pages (to like, 15) to see what effect that has."

If anything, "load of pages" would be over 10,000. Adding ten or fifty or five hundred pages isn't going to hurt you (just from the number of pages). if Google is paying attention to this, and in my view they aren't, they will be caring about the scrapers that add hundreds of thousands of pages, or at least tens of thousands.

[ogletree]

I have added several thousand to several sites recently and they are actualy doing better.

[caveman]

Ooops, I missed that this thread took off again.

The jury, IMHO, is still out on this, but what ogletree says can be cited by many members, i.e., that they have added up to 30-40% new pages to a site with no ill effect. So adding pages even in bulk is not necessarily a problem.

At the same time, many have posted (and stickied me) about this believing that their sites dropped dramatically shortly after a point in time where the *only* significant change was in fact the bulk addition of pages.

So if this is an issue, there may be some threshold of number of pages or percent increase or both that might cause a problem. Or maybe in line with what steveb says, even the kind of pages added. There could also be PR issues at work here if the new pages are discounted for a while.

Which leads me back to what is becoming my overarching philosophy wrt sites that make changes. The more 'unnatural' the site's activity looks to G, the greater the chance that some problem might arise. If I don't keep my rules simple like that, I can get easily lost. :-)

[Vec_One]

I'm fairly sure it's related to the number of new pages. More specifically, it's the linking consequences of new pages.

I've had two sites sandboxed. In both cases, the most significant factor before becoming mired in quicksand was the addition of new pages.

My sites are divided into sections, with each page in a section displaying links to most of the other pages in that section. If a section has 20 pages, a new page will link to - and be linked from - all of those pages. Plus, there are all of the other links in the template.

An ambitious site expansion can create some unnatural looking data.

[oldskool79]

A case in point would have to be webmaster world. I suspect webmaster world adds in 100's if not 1000's of pages a day. Yet I've never heard of webmaster world losing good rankings because of it.

WebmasterWorld consistently adds new pages -- they don't go for 6 months without updating and then all of a sudden add 20,000 pages.

Google may look at your average page additions and if there is suddenly a huge leap then they flag your site for futher manual review or another crawl with a specialized algorithm.

[ogletree]

I think it may depend on the pages you add. If they all look the same then you may have an issue. I generate pages but I make sure they are very different from each other. I'm talking buy a domain about some topic move to a new server and throwing up several thousand pages about loans.

[caveman]

ogletree, yeah, right now if I had to guess re the pages that seem to have sunk the site in question, I'd say its template/code dup filter of some sort. Only thing I can find that makes sense to me. Don't think it's a PR issue in this case.

[Spine]

Wow, from one thing to another, I keep finding reasons one of my sites has taken a nosedive.

In September I added a popular PHP based forum to my site, shorty after, my traffic from G has dropped badly.

I also noticed that my domain was showing up for some keywords without the www.

Just today I tried site:domain.com instead of site:www.domain.com, and guess what?

G thinks I have 400 pages more than my actual 100. I guess it's this session ID thing that I was unaware of before adding the forums. There's a heap of domain.com/forum/viewtopic.php?sid=gobledygookl83423asdf pages that I feel have somehow had something to do with the problem.

So G crawls my site, gets the impression that it grew 300 pages of identical crap over night, and I think that has thrown me into the sandbox. I took the forum down shortly after my drop, feeling it might be to blame, but I didn't notice all the session ID pages until now.

Ignorance sucks.

[caveman]

Spine from what I've seen/heard, there's a decent chance that your site will bounce back quickly. Hope so.

[Spine]

Thanks Caveman.

I feel that a few little things have contributed to the drop, but this might be the biggest, and just knowing (or thinking I do) puts my mind at ease. The past 2 months have been stress.

I think the php session ID pages screwed me, and also the way G started to handle my custom 404 that was redirecting surfers to my index page.

If my rankings come back around the same time the site:domain.com command returns the proper number of pages, I'll be posting.