Indexing a several millions pages new website

[Pureshore]

Hello everyone,

I am currently working for a huge classified website who will be released in France in September 2013.

The website will have up to 10 millions pages. I know the indexing of a website of such size should be done step by step and not in only one time to avoid a long sandbox risk and to have more control about it.

Do you guys have any recommandations or good practices for such a task ? Maybe some personal experience you might have had ?

The website will cover about 300 jobs :

• In all region (= 300 * 22 pages)
• In all departments (= 300 * 101 pages)
• In all cities (= 300 * 37 000 pages)

Do you think it would be wiser to index couple of jobs by couple of jobs (for instance 10 jobs every week) or to index with levels of pages (for exemple, 1st step with jobs in region, 2nd step with jobs in departements, etc.) ?

More generally speaking, how would you do in order to avoid penalties from Google and to index the whole site as fast as possible ?

One more specification : we'll rely on a (big ?) press followup and on a linking job that still has to be determined yet.

Thanks for your help !

Best Regards,

Raphael

[Pureshore]

Hello everyone,

Thanks for sharing your experience and your answers, it's greatly appreciated.

The website is build in order to avoid cookie cutter pages : each page will have unique content from classifieds (unique because classifieds won't be indexed in the first place, to avoid having too much pages).

The linking is as well though in order for each page to have permanents internal links in a logical way.

I understand from your answers that it is better to take time and to index the site step by step : mostly according to the number and the quality of classifieds (and thus the content) for each jobs/locality. It's not worth to index pages without any classifieds (and thus unique content) as they will be cut off by Google in a near future.

[jonnyholt]

I really don't think Google likes it when you release a website that big.  It would much rather you build it slowly.  I would urge you to have main pages and noindex the sub categories.

[iboxsecurityltd]

We worked in partnership with a similar large scale site last year and found the exact same. Google simply cut off 60% of our pages out of the index as they were cookie cutter.

You have to ensure that pages have relevant, unique and worthy content. Otherwise if all your doing is replacing the odd word here and there for the locality and job name its not going to work.

Focus on having an on going SEO campaign for each target audience be that  for e.g. by job type / locality / etc.

[EGOL]

If you plan to get a website that big indexed you will need to have a few things in order...

First, you will need thousands of deep links that connect to hub pages deep within the site.  These will force spiders down there and make them chew their way out through the unindexed pages.  These must be permanent links.  If you remove them then spiders will stop visiting and google will forget your pages.  For a 10 million page site you will need thousands of links hitting thousands of hub pages.

Second, for a site this big.... are you going to have substantive amounts of unique content?  If your pages are made from a cookie cutter and look like this....

"yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada SEO job in Paris yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada send application to Joseph Blowe, 11 Anystreet, Paris, France yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yadayada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada yada"

.... then Google will index these pages, then a few weeks to a few months later your entire site might receive a Panda penalty and drop from google.

Finally... all of those links needed to get the site in the index... they need to be Penguin proof.

It is not easy to get a big site in the index.  Google is tired of big cookie cutter sites with no information or yada yada content.  They are quickly toasted these days.