Can too many pages hurt crawling and ranking?

[TruvoDirectories]

Hi,

I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good.

We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)?

Please advice

[TommyTan]

Hi,

I don't believe having toooooooo many pages will hurt crawling and ranking.  Actually having a lot of pages will give crawl bots more pages to crawl and when someone searches for keywords related to your pages, your pages might show up.

The only 2 problems I see from having too many pages are

1. With all these pages, are they all unique?  With a lot of pages, it will be hard to manager and to keep track if all of them are unique.  If you don't have unique pages and have a lot of duplicate, that will hurt your ranking.

2. The second problem is are you inter-linking all your pages?  Can the bot crawl all your pages?  You will need to have a good linking system and direct bots to different pages for them to crawl.  Having a lot of pages will be difficult to manage as I mentioned above.  Can you interlink all of them so the bots can crawl all of them?  One solution I see to this is submitting a Sitemap but I am not sure if they will index everything since I had a problem with Google only indexing 4% of my sitemap and still can't find solution.

Hope this helps!

[EricPratum30]

This is really just speculation...

It sounds like you're solid on the on-page, site architecture side. I would assume that crawling and indexation will slow down though if your offsite signals don't keep up though. By this, I mean that Google might see that you're doing everything right on your end, but that over time you're not creating content that very many people care to link to, share, etc, so they'll stop wasting resources on you.