Is Pushing Live Too Many Pages Risky For SEO

In two separate cases recently, I was asked the same question which was "Does adding too many pages to my site quickly affect my SEO?" and I found it fascinating to see how site owners view Google and their various guidelines. Yes Google are the gatekeepers to the internet in many ways and staying in their good books is essential if you want to build a sustainable business with traffic from organic search, but Google is by no means unreasonable nor are they some spiteful tyrant when it comes to indexing content. 

To cut this post short, for those of you who don't plan to read any further, there is NO penalty associated with submitting multiple URLs at once; this can be in the hundreds or even in the thousands. 

Well at least from my personal experience that has been the case, but this is by no means a definitive rule. There are cases when it can be a problem.

If anyone could create thousands of pages each day for Google to index, it would be mass chaos with low-quality pages flooding indexes and reducing the accuracy of search results. Google's page rank algorithm is what sets pages apart and how the search engine perceives the value of a page as it pertains to a search query. 

So how do you safely push live multiple pages without Google thinking your spamming and just blocking those pages? How do you avoid shipping an entire portion of your site directly into the abyss that is the supplemental index? Let me take you through the do's and do not's of mass uploading.

Why are you adding so many pages?

Okay, the first thing we need establish is why are you adding so many pages all at once? If you intend to provide new content or experiences to your customers, then I think you're in a safe space. 

Safe mass uploads include:

• If this was a blocked section of your website
• A new part of the site you've been working on
• A new supplier you've added
• A blog series you've kept hidden or was behind a paywall
• Pages with content you've been stockpiling for some time
• The launch of a new service or category
• Launching your site in a new region
• Launching your website in a new language

If your intentions are either to scam Google, are unethical, or you're simply lazy then you're probably going to alert Google and could be in for a penalty or two.

Not safe mass uploading include:

• Content spinning
• Plagiarising
• Duplicating content
• Mass upload of generic supplier content
• Autogenerated pages
• Content splitting without pagination

Detecting anomalies

Google’s algorithms note unusual patterns, and because they scan your site regularly, they assign a crawl budget based on previous crawls. Adding a large number of pages to a website in a day is unusual. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s something the site owner did wrong. 

There are lots of reasons this could happen – the most common one being that a site could be hacked. Google has systems in place to identify this type of suspicious activity and apply other filters to it because it’s dangerous to present searchers with a potentially hacked site.

If you're honestly expanding your site, you have nothing to worry about when adding a number of pages.

Manual reviews & judgment calls

Sometimes mass uploads will trigger a manual review, which means a human will take a look at the situation and make a judgment call. I believe that in the machine learning world, there are likely fewer humans reviewing these anomalies than there used to be, but the machines apply the same constructs. Some of these might be to flag content that seems to have lots of spammy links or duplicated content.

My own experiences of mass uploads

In my personal experience, I've launched new subfolders or a series of pages reserved for a campaign all in one go and Google has always been receptive. When uploading your new pages to your site make sure they are:

• Optimised correctly
• Host original content
• URLs have been included in your sitemap
• The host subfolder is not blocked via your robots file
• Pages do not have meta no-index tags

If you have done the above Google should have no problem adding your new pages in a day or two and you could be up and running to compete for a whole new range of traffic and queries.

Share your website story

Have you been struggling to get views after adding multiple pages to your site? Share your stories or tips with us in the comments. We would love to hear from you.

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