Penalty for adding too much content too quickly?

[SteveW1987]

Hi there,

We released around 4000 pieces of new content, which all ranked in the first page and did well. We had a database of ~400,000 pieces and so we released the entire library in a couple of days (all remaining 396,000 pages).

The pages have indexed.

The pages are not ranking, although the initial batch are still ranking as are a handful (literally a handful) of the new 396,000. When I say not ranking - I mean not ranking anywhere (gone up as far as page 20), yet the initial batch we'd be ranking for competitive terms on page 1.

Do Google penalise you for releasing such a volume of content in such a short space of time? If so, should we deindex all that content and re-release in slow batches? And finally, if that is the course of action we should take is there any good articles around deindexing content at scale.

Thanks so much for any help you are able to provide.

Steve

[max.favilli]

I doubt so. Can you share a link?

Did you publish an updated sitemap?

Do you see a spike in "Pages crawled per day" in "Google WMT/Search Console", in Crawl->Crawl Stats?

400k is a lot, it may take some time to crawl all of them

Did you structure your sitemap as a tree? if you did, adding the 400k new pages to a sub node of the sitemap, you can check in Crawl->Sitemaps how many of those pages are already indexed, and if the figure is growing or not on a day/week basis.

[SteveW1987]

Thanks for replying. The site is getinspired365 dot com.

We saw a spike of 11,000, then 29,000 then back down a steady ~1500.

Yes, we have structured our sitemap such that there is 7 sitemaps (one for authors of 15,000) and then 5 for our quotes (40,000 each) and one for our topics (2000). Looking at it around 90% has successfully been indexed. This was done around 2 months ago and as I say it has pretty much all been indexed but it is not ranking - at all. However, our first batch of content is ranking and ranking really well. It is as though this new content has some sort of penalty and is therefore not ranking in Google but I am not sure 1. What the penalty is and 2. How to fix it? I want to deindex the entire site and start again, and just add the content in much smaller batches but I am not sure how best to do that.

thanks