I have a site that I want to change in some ways and I'm not sure how this might affect its performance in google. This is a PR2 site, but it's relatively successful (1500 visits a day). It has a news section which currently lists small news articles (about 200 words each or less) one after another, in pages of 40 articles each. This makes it easy for readers to check out all the latest news I add without having to jump from one page to another. I want to change the structure of that section so there is one page for each news article. This would enable me to have the title of each article in the URL, meta tags, <title> tag and a <h1> tag. I understand this is a good practice. However by making that change this section would grow from the 50 pages it currently has to more than 2000. I don't know if Google would crawl them all considering this is a PR2 site. What's your opinion on this? Would it help or hurt my site?
I think it would help in the long run. I would use a blog script like wordpress for the news section. It will make it easy to add articles and is very SE friendly. To maintain your current rankings, you could leave the current pages as is and add the all the new stuff to the blog.