Why do I hear that it can be a bad thing to have too many content pages?

[Clicksjim]

My site has lots of long tail opportunity and so intention is to produce as much content as possible to target these keywords effectively.

However, over the last 6 months I have come across numerous sources suggesting that Google can/does look down on a site having too many content pages. Is there any truth in this?  Thanks.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Excellent answer by Gil. Thanks for the great post. The purpose behind the search engines' very own existence is to provide and present the visitors with, the most relevant and comprehensive information about the search term and as long as your pages provide this to the visitors, they will rank high in the search engine results pages and can possibly withstand the future algorithm changes.

[GilReich]

If all of the pages are very valuable and serve the user you should be OK. But if Google finds too many people clicked a search result to your page, and then quickly bounced back to Google and clicked a different result from the search listings, they'll trust your site less and lower your rankings across the board.

The problem isn't too many pages, it's too many pages that aren't satisfying enough of Google's users.

In February 2011 Google launched "Panda" whose main intent was to find sites that were creating many low quality pages. Since then, the "content farm" strategy of quickly creating many pages has generally been backfiring.

Instead focus on pages that will satisfy Google's users, and preferably also attract social shares and links.