We are about to launch a country-wide portal with local infos. We are now wondering if we should put nofollow tags on most of the sites in the beginning and then "release" them to Google only step-by-step. Does this make sense or should we allow Google to crawl as much pages as it likes? We would like 50k pages to be indexed.
Which nofollow are you talking about? meta robots? If you have unique information on all these 50k pages, allow google to index them. You can also change crawl speed after a month or so and increase it in google webmaster tools. (I don't think live or yahoo allow that).
We are thinking about only allowing Google to crawl about 500 sites per week. And release 500 new pages every next week. We heard about rumors that it might be better to have Google index only a couple of pages when your domain is completely new and not so strong yet and are wondering if this is the better way to do it. Does anyone have any advice?
First, for the first 6 months of a new site's life, it is in the "Google Sandbox". In reality, you will have no inbound links that Google will count. For large sites, it may take a year for Google to index all pages so any "recommendation" is dumb. Release every page ASAP and every site ASAP. Let Google decide what they will do. You will need to submit the sites to Google, set up the Webmaster Tools Account for each site and submit XML Sitemaps weekly to be successful. But without knowing why you have 500 sites, I feel you should address this concept. You may be setting your self up for duplicate content or cross linking penalties. And to use the "nofollow" attribute is dumb advise. Again, let Google decide what they need.