We all want to keep The Google happy—and one way to do that is by avoiding adding too many pages to your website at one time, which might raise a red flag and result in a manual review from the dreaded awesome Google spam team.
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.
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years’ experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging develoment, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly’s coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”