Should I add an archive of hundreds of thousands of pages all at once or in stages?

Matt's answer:

John Mueller in Switzerland asks, “A newspaper company wants to add an archive with 200,000 pages. Should they add it all at once or in steps?” It’s a fair question. I think we can handle it either way, so we should be able to process it. But if we see a lot of pages or a lot of things ranking on a site all of a sudden, then we might take a look at it from the manual webspam team. So if it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever to you in terms of the timing of the roll out, I might stage it a little bit and do it in steps. That way it’s not as if you’ve suddenly dropped 5 million pages on the web. And it’s relatively rare to be able to drop hundreds of thousands of pages on the web and have them be really high quality. An archive of a newspaper is a great example of that. But if it’s all the same to you, and it doesn’t make that much of a difference, I might tend to do it more in stages and do more of a gradual roll out. And you could still roll them out in large blocks, but just break that up a little bit. Hope that helps.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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