
This subject was the topic of a recent video from Google’s Matt Cutts. He addressed a query posed on behalf of a newspaper company, which, as you can imagine, is dealing with a veritable ton of archived content—around 200,000 pages, to be precise.
The average website has nowhere near this many pages, but if you do find yourself archiving a large number of pages and content at one time, it might be a better idea to add them in small chunks, rather than in one fell swoop.
“If we see a lot of pages or a lot of things ranking on a site all of a sudden, we might take a look at it,” Matt says. “If it’s all the same to you and it doesn’t make that much of a difference, I’d do more of a gradual roll-out.”
Interested in learning more? Here’s Matt’s complete response:
Of course, the big question is how many pages are too many? We’re thinking that the magic number is likely in the thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands—and again, that impressive amount of content (especially high quality content) is only going to apply to a small number of sites. Still, if you’re working with a media company or another entity that’s amassed a sizable pile of content and needs to archive it, it’s probably worth your while to schedule those page archives in stages so that you don’t incur Google’s wrath. There are few things that are less fun than a manual Google review, so the more you can avoid it, the better off you’ll be.