50,000 pages or a page with parameters

[Banknotes]

I have a site with about 12k pages on a topic... each of these pages could use another several pages to go into deeper detail about the topic.

So, I am wondering, for SEO purposes would it be better to have something like 50,000 new pages for each sub topic or have one page that I would pass parameters to and the page would be built on the fly in code behind.

The drawback to the one page with parameters is that the URL would be static but the effort to implement would be minimal.  I am also not sure how google would index a single page with parameters.

The drawback to the 50k pages model is the dev effort and possibly committed some faux pas by unleashing so many links to my internal pages.  I might also have to mix aspx with html because my project can't be that large.

Anyone here ever have this sort of choice to make?  Is there a third way I am not considering?

[FedeEinhorn]

If a page uses parameters to build the content say www.example.com/topic?page=1, www.example.com/topic?page=2 and so on, the URLs aren't the same, therefore each page will be indexed as a different page.

Both options you mention will create a huge set of new pages, the query parameter one it's ok, but an URL that has text describing the content is more user friendly.

Also, both methods could be used to develop it, using some ASP and URL rewriting it shouldn't be much different. I personally would go with an URL that describes the content, like: www.example.com/topic/subtopic