Does adding lots of new content on a site at one time actually hurt you?

[JordanRussell]

When speaking with a client today, he made the comment that he didn't want all of the new content we'd been working to be added to the site all at once for fear that he would get penalized for flooding the site with new content. I don't have any strong data to confirm or refute the claim, is there any truth to it?

[jesse-landry]

No truth to that whatsoever. That's weird paranoia.

If there was some sort of problem WITH the content, maybe. But there would be no penalty for all new content added.

I've done total site overhauls plenty of times and they get indexed quick with no penalties.. (although I will say the speed of this seems to be in flux, but I digress.)

Don't let the client worry about this. Think about any website that initially launches: why would Google penalize that?

Hope this helps. Paranoia is often the toughest challenge when it comes to dealing with clients/site owners.

[JordanRussell]

Thanks Jesse, that was my thought exactly. If anything, I see incrementally adding the content as a negative thing, since it will lead to a less than complete user experience.

[danatanseo]

I agree with Jesse for the most part. I think the key is: what kind of content we are talking about? Adding tons of low-value, thin content pages to a site all at once (or even gradually) is probably going to diminish the authority of existing content. I do think that adding thousands of pages that have no page authority to a site that contains pages with a decent amount of authority could, theoretically, dilute the authority of the existing pages depending on site architecture, internal linking and the ratio of existing pages versus new pages. However, I would expect this to be only temporary, and if the new content is great quality, should be nothing to worry about long term.

[Prospector-Plastics]

I agree with Jesse. Earlier this year we added a new data-driven section to our website that included (believe it or not) 83,000 pages, all unique in content since the information is highly technical in nature. No associated penalties have resulted from this.

[JordanRussell]

It is a real estate site and the content is a directory of the various condos available in their community. The pages are all unique and have real valuable content, so I don't think there will be any issues with content quality.

There is new content and blogging that occurs regularly on the site. I think that the client's concern comes from some old concepts that if we're only adding content infrequently, but in mass, that it may be seen as spammy.

[artdivision]

I agree with all colleagues above, I cant see how your web site will be penalised due to lots of pages uploaded at the same time.

However Adding Too Many Pages Too Quickly May Flag A Site To Be Reviewed Manually. This means thought that you will add hundreds of thousand of link a night. Here is the related via by Matt Cutts:

http://searchengineland.com/google-adding-too-many-pages-too-quickly-may-flag-a-site-to-be-reviewed-manually-156058

Hope you find this useful!