I have run a site called getinspired365.com for the last few years. All it does is dish out a new inspiring video everyday. Recently we decided to implement an SEO strategy around the creation of quote pages. We have created 200,000 different quote pages (e.g. http://www.getinspired365.com/brave-men-rejoice-in-adversity-just-as-brave-soldiers-triumph-in-war). As well as this, we've created 15,000 author pages (e.g.http://www.getinspired365.com/george-washington-quotes). We initially did a small batch to see if we could rank for different terms such as the start of a particular quote or "person's name quotes" and fortunately we ranked pretty well - on the first page for a lot of quotes, and authors.
What we then did was release all of these new pages over the next week or two - so 215,000 pages. They've all indexed fine and we've received no errors on Webmaster Tools. We've not done any blackhat stuff and our domain is pretty solid having been featured by Techcrunch, BBC and others. On MOZ our individual pages are getting an "A" grade for SEO. We did this activity around 10 weeks ago.
However, almost all of these pages are not ranking anywhere in Google. We accept that they may not rank on page 1 but they're not even ranking in the top 20 pages despite our small batch ranking really well. Some brand new pages, weirdly, are ranking (e.g.http://www.getinspired365.com/andrea-bocelli-quotes ranks on page 2 and http://www.getinspired365.com/walter-sisulu-quotes ranks page 1). We've seen no real rise in search impressions within Webmaster tools - so it is as though there's a penalty on our site, but not on all of our site - and not on just the new pages.
I just wondered if anyone had any idea what could be causing the issue? Is it simply that we have released too much content too quickly? And if so, would you recommend de-indexing everything and almost starting again by just doing very small batches over a long period of time.
Really appreciate any advice you may be able to offer.
thanks,
Steve