Do you guys think it is important for a website to grow slowly over time? I am thinking that the strategy of throwing up 10,000 pages from the outset may not be working as well anymore and it might be better to start with just a few hundred or even less and grow from there...thoughts?
It depends on your model of business and revenue. For some websites specially content oriented website must gain volume in serp but on the other hand producd oriented websites need good rank whether thru serp or adwords.
If the content is not duplicate already then it should not possess to much problems. The main barrier is the timeframe to get it all indexed and the natural linkbuilding resulting in higher pagerank and effectively deeper crawling. 10,000 pages may take quite a while to get fully indexed if there are insufficient inbound links, so over time eventually serps will be well covered.
I think slow growth of a WEBSITE is important, that it shouldn't just all be up there at once, but organic traffic will follow you accordingly on how you market the site with inbound links.
well from my experience at atleast with msn is they have ranked me high whenever I would throw up a 10,000 page site all at once. other search engines never really responed. I agree though, its better to just add new content like everyday. SE love new stuff.
If you really "the blackest hat" surely you would know the answer to this question. Cool name, welcome to DP!
welcome to dp. Organic growth does matter to some search engines if a domain is new (at least in my experience)
If you suddenly added 10,000 pages at once that might seem a little suspicious to the search engines. IMO It would probably be better to add a bunch of pages per day.