Google’s John Mueller answered a question about the impact of increasing a website’s size by ten times its original size. Mueller’s answer should give pause to anyone considering making their site dramatically larger, as it will cause Google to see it as a brand new website and trigger a re-evaluation.Google Cautions: Exponential Content Growth Causes Re-Evaluation
Impact Of Making A Site Bigger
One of the reasons for a site migration is joining two websites into one website, which can cause a site to become even larger. Another reason for an increase in size is the addition of a massive amount of new products.
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This is the question that was asked in the SEO Office Hours podcast:
“What’s the impact of a huge expansion of our product portfolio on SEO Performance, for example going from 10,000 to products to 100,000?”
It must be pointed out that the question is about a site growing ten times larger.
This is is Mueller’s answer:
“I don’t think you have to look for exotic explanations. If you grow a website significantly, in this case, by a factor of 10, then your website will overall be very different. By definition, the old website would only be 10% of the new website. This means it’s only logical to expect search engines to re-evaluate how they show your website. It’s basically a new website after all.Google Cautions: Exponential Content Growth Causes Re-Evaluation
It’s good to be strategic about changes like this, I wouldn’t look at it as being primarily an SEO problem.”
Re-Evaluate How Google Shows A Website
Mueller said it’s not primarily an SEO problem but it’s possible most SEOs would disagree because anything that affects how a search engine shows a site is an SEO problem. Maybe Mueller meant that it should be seen as a strategic problem?
Regardless, John Mueller’s answer means that growing a site exponentially in a short amount of time could cause Google to re-evaluate a site because it’s essentially an an entirely new website, which might be an undesirable scenario.
Although Mueller didn’t specify how long a re-evaluation can take, he has indicated in the past that it can take months. Maybe things have changed but this is what he said four years ago about how long a sitewide evaluation takes:
“It takes a lot of time for us to understand how a website fits in with regards to the rest of the Internet.
…And that’s something that can easily take, I don’t know, a couple of months, a half a year, sometimes even longer than a half a year, for us to recognize significant changes in the site’s overall quality.”
The implication of a sitewide evaluation triggered by an exponential growth in content is that the optimized way to approach content growth is to do it in phases. It’s something to consider.
Listen to the Google SEO Office Hours podcast at the 4:24 minute mark:
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