In my continuing series on Google Filters, today I am going to discuss the Too Many Pages At Once Filter.
How It Works
Google likes to see that your webpage is growing consistently and over time. They like up to date content that is relevant to a specific topic and has incoming, relevant links. However, if you have too many pages of content that appear “overnight” on your website you can trigger the Too Many Pages At Once Filter.
The reason why this filter exists is again the fault of spamming, get-rich-quick SEO pirates. When webmasters realized that content was king they made the drive to acquire as much content as possible on their sites. They stole content from other websites en masse (called “scraping”) and claimed it as their own. By running their scraping software, website owners could overnight have thousands of targeted pages set up on their site.
Google used to fall for this scheme and these sites rose to the top of the index. Enter the Too Many Pages At Once Filter. This filter was set up to combat website owners who scrape other urls and add countless pages of content to their sites too quickly.
What You Can Do
Have a natural progression – The important thing to keep in mind is that Google wants to see a natural progression of pages added to your site. If you add 20 pages overnight you do not have to worry about being penalized but if you go from a one page site to hundreds of pages or more all of a sudden you risk being penalized.
Add new pages over time – Many sure your new pages are added over a period of time and that you continue to create new content. Do not add a hundred pages one day and nothing for another month. This kind of activity looks suspicious.
Get external links – Also try to get external links to the pages you create. The more links you have from external sites to your new pages, the more likely Google is going to identify them as quality articles instead of fake content that was stolen from other sites.
Evan Carmichael
This is true, but do keep in mind it is only a filter. You are unlikely to be penalised for it. You simply won’t have all your pages indexed.
My website scrapped masses of public domain data, and now has many thousand pages. Since launch a couple of weeks ago, Google has steadily indexed more and more pages. In recently days, around 3 pages per day.
The whole point of course, is to have as many pages indexed as possible. This way you are likely to gain significantly more organic traffic.
Since Google has indexed more of my website, our organic traffic has jumped from (don’t laugh) from 2 to 11 visits a day.
I believe in your last point however. We’ve been link building like crazy to encourage Google to index us more.