SEO-tutorials and seminars will usually use the smaller, more neat websites as examples: startpage, a few products, contact information, legal information, and company description – and they are not really wrong in doing so: many of the “classic”, often occurring SEO-problems are noticeably easier to handle for small sites if they even show up. If we now consider that De-domains with a PageRank of 5 have an average of 5500 pages and those with a PageRank of 8 will have around 200.000 pages per domain in the Googleindex, then we should also regard the problems that these pages can come up against.

Is the internal linkstructure well-engineered?

While in small projects a one-step, rather simple navigation that is present on all pages is enough, the problem will grow steadily with a growing number of pages. While in the beginning, a second navigational level and a clean sitemap might be enough, this will become noticeably more complicated for projects that have grown over the years and whose page count is in the 10th- or even 100s-of-thousands. For these cases you will have to come up with ways and solutions in which the internal linking is scaled to the growth of the site and where the internal weight of the individual pages and categories are depicted accordingly.

How do you generate deeplinks?

Everyone who has tried linkbuilding for projects with up to 100 pages will be able to imagine that such an endeavor will be extremely time-consuming for the tenfold amount of pages and that it will be near to impossible for the hundred- or thousand-fold amount. While it is true that the “strength” of the domain has, in recent years, gained an increasing role in the Google-algorithm through which subpages will rank properly even without external, incoming links – the real power still comes from the outside. This is also an area where strategies have to be developed to implement a lasting linkbuilding while keeping the cost- and labor-expenditure down.

What pages have to be in the searchengine?

The days in which the creed was to “push as many pages into the Googleindex as possible” are over. Ever since the division of the index into first and second class (alias “supplemental index”) you have to consider carefully if every user or product really needs a multitude of identical and value deprived pages. With a little bad luck, these pages will chase the pages that are actually driving traffic out of the first index and will thereby cause problems.