Effect of number of pages on rankings

[chester]

I am running into a problem with some of the urls on my site with the dynamic links. I have about 25 static pages indexed and optimized for my keywords, and another 700 dynamic pages that are not indexed, how much impact would fixing the urls (&cid= for example) and getting these pages indexed have on the rankings of the keywords for the original 25 pages and on PR? Without considering the benefit of the additional keywords ranking on the dynamic pages, how big an issue?

[marthrock]

Im thinking that it would not affect the pages already ranked and that it would add value to the non-indexed pages... Your not penalized for linking other pages on your site, provided you do "fix" the pages.

[PaulaFrew]

if your dynamic pages are not being indexed then logic would say to fix them so that they do get ranked....

[chester]

Fixing them is obvious, that was not the question. I was looking for information about the search engine algorithims and what effect increasing the size of a site can have on rankings for keywords and pagerank on already spidered pages, leaving out all other factors.

[Johan007]

Yes. Increasing the number of pages decreases you in the SERPS because you need more inbound links to support your case in Google democracy. HOWEVER sites with more pages do better in the long run and manage to get the required inbound links giving the site more "site worth" when ranking a page that is only linked from the "site". Warning: If you add thousands of pages suddenly you will also be Sandboxed.

Google can spider dynamic URL’s and people who say otherwise have obviously never used Google and for those people Googles url is www.google.com

The only draw back to dynamic url’s is when a site is first launched without many back links the first few pages are slower to index… but I am sure you would agree this no reason to mod-rewrite that leads to other problems.

So this just wrong...

Originally Posted by PaulaFrew

if your dynamic pages are not being indexed then logic would say to fix them so that they do get ranked....

I would say "get more inbound links" ... submit to the Microsoft Small business Directory should do it for site with a few hundred pages.

[tmoon]

Definitely fix the urls. Having worked on a number of large dynamic messes over the past few years, I can say that it usually makes a huge difference in indexability and rank-ability both, especially if you have two or more parameters (=) in your dynamic url strings.

The biggest thing to be concerned with now is adding too many pages at once, as you asked. We just increased total number of pages on one of our sites from around 800 to over 7,000 (added a bunch of stuff to the database) and it went from 1K+ visitors per day from Google to less than 5 . So, proceed with extreme caution. We didn't realize that many new pages were being created, thought it was only a few thousand, but too bad so sad for us I guess... This was a PR6 site with around 3,000 backlinks (mostly from different urls and ips). Tried reverting back to previous state and waiting a month but no change so time to start focusing that site towards ranking better in Y and MSN. I'm still not sure exactly what tripped that freaking filter but it's probably more sandbox BS based on increasing the size of site too quickly (from a % standpoint or numerical basis like X thousands of new pages). Might have been some near duplicate issues at work as well, trying to test some things now. At the time I figured worst case everything else would still rank similarly but we're gonzo, so just be careful. If I have to do it again on another site I'll probably try to figure out a way to automatically add just a handful of new pages per day or something stupid like that to make the big bad G happy...

[chester]

Google can spider dynamic URL’s and people who say otherwise have obviously never used Google and for those people Googles url is www.google.com

Google does state in their webmaster info that they spider dynamic links with one exception, which is the one I have.
According to: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.

Anyway, the site is new, and needs more work than just the urls, but does have some rankings on MSN and Yahoo. Thanks for the feedback.

[Johan007]

[EDIT]

Oh I have checked your site www.gourmetgiftfactory.com

And yeah thats just bad programming.

do the url like this:

gourmetgiftfactory.com/products.php?producID=22

or

gourmetgiftfactory.com/products.php?id=22

[ezest]

Johan007 mentioned about Microsoft Small business Directory ..Can anyone share thier experience with same? Is it effective and worth going for same?

[Johan007]

Originally Posted by ezest

Johan007 mentioned about Microsoft Small business Directory ..Can anyone share thier experience with same? Is it effective and worth going for same?

IF you have a new site and IF you cant get any links to that new site its an ideal place to submit too and should provide enough weight for a decent crawl within reason and the ability to rank for at least the site name or domain provided it is still relatively low competitive. Sometimes clients expect a site you made to be in Google and its far more reliable than free Google Submit and pray will ever be.

[ezest]

Thanks Johan007. One more question for you Does link in this directory will be counted as link by Google (link: Operator)?

Regards

[nandini]

Yeah.. MSBD is a good place to start building your link popularity. I do get a decent traffic from there too as a bonus.

Google link operation is kinda broken, but link from the directory do count.

[ezest]

Thanks Nandini. Will definitely consider this. I agree with you Google links has gone haywire.

[Johan007]

Yes its counts but dont forget its only for 1 year and then you pay them more money. Careful you dont go for the bull**** submit plus or what ever MS call it... just stick to the directory.