Getting your website flagged could make your business stand out a bit more and hopefully attract new visitors, new potential clients and new business. However that one entity you don’t want to flag your website to is Google, mainly for SEO reasons. Reason being if your site does get flagged it could put you in front of Google’s Web Spam team who will go through your site with a fine comb and look to restrict your progress wherever you can. Not out of any malicious intent, but Google pride themselves on having the best results that not only are accurate, but provide a great user experience.
One of the things that could get your website flagged is by adding a lot of content at a time. To rank on the first page of Google’s organic listings, you have to have an organic site. Organic sites grow and develop and if they were to suddenly bloom from 50 pages to 9,000 then alarm bells will soundly ring out. Let me give you an example.
You’re a company that launched a website last year and you are now ranking quite well for your phrases. One of your diligent staff members finds an archive of content, nearly 2,000 pages worth. All the content is relevant, good quality and can only improve your user’s experience. Your instinct would be to get it all on your website as soon as possible to boost your rankings. But if you’re adding a lot of content at once then Google could be prompted to investigate.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if your site has only ever employed White Hat tactics. A member of Google’s webspam team will take a look at your site to make sure the content you’re adding is quality, relevant and not intended to manipulate the rankings.
In an ideal world, you should break the content you’re adding into chunks and upload them gradually. Now I don’t expect everyone to do this as it is impractical and can take up a fair amount of time what with the planning, the breaking down, the categorising etc. But if you want to do it properly then that is the way you should do it.
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
