One of my sites has 200 - 300 pages of unique articles and content, and ranks well in Google. It also has a forum with several thousand pages of content - but the pages aren't SE friendly so Google doesn't know about them and doesn't find them in searches. Question: If I make the forum or a forum archive SE friendly and Google finds thousands of new pages in a short space of time, is this likely to result in a penalty for the whole website? I'm sure I've read in the past of people being penalized for this. Does anyone have any recent experience - positive or negative? Thanks
I don't think that it would immediately lead to penalisation, but it may raise a couple of flags either triggerring a closer examination or to see if any black hat tactics might be in place. If you're happy that the site is clean, I'd say go for it. You may be able to speed the index process up with a Google sitemap.
What you normally read about being penalized for is a sudden influx of inbound links (e.g. purchasing links or using other sites to obtain an "unnatural" all of a sudden quantity of links). This can get you in the "sandbox" for a time. As far as I know, getting a large number of existing pages to all of a sudden be found in Google is a good thing! Usually, when a client of mine has a site with similar number of pages you mentioned, we move forward with optimization and link building straight away. I find that it gets listed and ranked rather well and rather quickly (e.g. 2-3 months approx.) unless a phrase is extremely competitive. I would also suggest using the Google sitemap as well. IMHO.
No prblem at all should result. I decided to make my rugby forum more friendly and it went from a hundred or so pages, to 5,000 no problem.
Thanks for the reassurance guys. I'll go ahead with it then and hope for the best. I'll report back if I'm penalized.
p.s. Mods, I must be half asleep. I thought I'd posted this in the Google forum. Any chance of moving it?
The problem arises when you have a 10 page site for years and then suddenly the site has 10,000 pages. If you add a lot of pages often (such as a forum) its not really a big deal. I have a site that is about 4,000 pages now. I add and delete about 200 every month. Its not a big deal. I have another site that is 400 pages or so - and pages get added once every 2-3 months or something. If I started adding 200 pages to that for now on, I think it might raise some flags.
For the record, there was no penalization. Typing the site: command in Google now shows over 25,000 pages indexed. (I'm not sure how G counts as many pages as that - there are far fewer in fact.)
I would make sure you have enough backlinks to handle that many pages. Sometimes its better to have fewer higher ranked pages than 20,000 lesser ones.
Backlinks aren't a problem on this one and Google is finding forum pages in searches quite satisfactorily. I seriously don't know how Google arrives at the page count it does though. I've seen in another thread people discussing how the number of pages indexed by Google from their sites has shot up. The true page count on the site I'm talking about here is definitely below 10,000 pages. Google counts over 25,000. Yahoo counts less than 2,000. Hmmm.