Bulk Posting Content

[Dural]

Hi guys. I have another question for you.

Seeing an opportunity in the search engines, I've decided to create a reference site organized like a book with chapters and subsections. It'll have 200-300 pages of content.

Right now, I'm pushing out several pages of content per day in my word processor. I'm planning to post all of it to the web site once the entire book is finished.

I'm wondering if I'll be penalized for that by the search engines. It's an irregular expansion of content, and I can imagine it's similar to the content arc of a spam site.

The alternative is to post the content as I write it, but it's so much more work. I'm sure I'm going to make lots of small revisions before finishing, and it's much easier to move things around in a word processor than the published content.

What would you do?

[Chris]

No worries, too much content isn't something search engines penalize for.

There is however a natural effect at work.

You're building off a current site correct? Well adding a new section with a small amount of content on a current site will dilute to a lesser degree the weight you send to it when compared with a new section with a large amount of content.

So it may seem that a new site with more content gets lower overall rankings, but this is only at first and it should quickly catch up. It is certainly not a reason to publish in bits and pieces.

[Dural]

Thanks for the help, Chris. It's actually a new site with a new topic. Will that change anything?

[Chris]

Not at all, except it makes what I said irrelevant.

It is definitely better to launch a site with a decent amount of content for the risk of alienating early visitors who might be turned off by too little content.

[peach]

\You're building off a current site correct? Well adding a new section with a small amount of content on a current site will dilute to a lesser degree the weight you send to it when compared with a new section with a large amount of content.

So it may seem that a new site with more content gets lower overall rankings, but this is only at first and it should quickly catch up. It is certainly not a reason to publish in bits and pieces.

Well you can "fix" this by paginating your section frontpages.
On a sidenote, do you know of an alternative to paginating, I hate the idea of having the second page of a section anchored with the text "next page" or "2"...
I can imagine it might be beneficial to turn this text into "next page Widgets" and "2 Widgets" but that would make your navigation less usable. Unless you make the contextual part hidden but I don't want to go there ;)

[peach]

Hi guys. I have another question for you.

Seeing an opportunity in the search engines, I've decided to create a reference site organized like a book with chapters and subsections. It'll have 200-300 pages of contentWhat would you do?

I would put part of the content online right away and schedule part of it to publish spread over a couple of months/years into the future, wich is good for return visitors.

[Dural]

Good point about return visitors. Right now, I have two objectives:

1) A successful launch
2) Return visitors

The problem with drawing out the content over a long schedule is everyone is doing it. There's nothing remarkable about posting an article a day.

Starting with 25-30K words, on the other hand, draws some attention and gives me much more credibility. I should be able to get some back links from reputable and high traffic sites.

Then I plan on expanding on the topic, writing a 300-500 word article every day for two months or so. That should draw some return visitors.

From there, I'm hoping the forum will have established itself and return visitors will come back for it, rather than new articles. I am NOT planning on writing new content every few days forever on this site.

Rather than some occasional case studies to build back links and keep me in the press, I'm planning to step away.

That brings up another question. Can you stay at the top of the search engines without constantly writing new content? None of my competitors are content sites, so I'm hoping there's a chance.

If regular posts are a requirement, I suppose I could give a few expert members blogs, kind of like SP. But that's a headache I would rather avoid.