Too many pages indexed?

Is there any harm in having too many pages indexed by google? We are using vbseo and the sitemap plugin and have 143,000 pages indexed.

There are right around 650,000 pages in my sitemap, so I am expecting this to get even bigger. I do worry about Google thinking that I am spamming them though...

There is certainly no harm in having millions of pages IF:

• The pages are not duplicate content or duplicate paths to the same content

With that many pages indexed, you want to make sure every page indexed is unique. You definitely do not want Google wasting time re-crawling duplicate content.

As a vBSEO user, almost all duplicate content issues are already solved for you. However, I would strongly consider disabling the showpost pages by using the vBSEO feature to "replace showpost with Permalink" if you have not done so already.

That will *greatly* reduce the # of pages included in your sitemap, and reduce Google's work load for your site, without sacrificing any of your unique content from being included.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

There is certainly no harm in having millions of pages IF:

• The pages are not duplicate content or duplicate paths to the same content

With that many pages indexed, you want to make sure every page indexed is unique. You definitely do not want Google wasting time re-crawling duplicate content.

As a vBSEO user, almost all duplicate content issues are already solved for you. However, I would strongly consider disabling the showpost pages by using the vBSEO feature to "replace showpost with Permalink" if you have not done so already.

That will *greatly* reduce the # of pages included in your sitemap, and reduce Google's work load for your site, without sacrificing any of your unique content from being included.

I did as suggested, but wouldn't this greatly increase the amount of duplicate content you have? If you anchor the link to each post to the showthread page, you now have 10 pages indexed with the same exact content.

Originally Posted by Corey

I did as suggested, but wouldn't this greatly increase the amount of duplicate content you have? If you anchor the link to each post to the showthread page, you now have 10 pages indexed with the same exact content.

Can somebody address this? Is there an exception that I don't know about?

An anchor is not a part of URL, so you will have indexed only a single URL.
For instance, there is only one indexed page for this thread: site:http://www.vbseo.com/f4/too-many-pages-indexed-24533/ - Buscar con Google

all you need to do is:

- use the option in vbseocp for "replace showpost with permalink"
- remove showpost from the sitemap generator
- robots.txt out showpost.php

Originally Posted by Oleg Ignatiuk

An anchor is not a part of URL, so you will have indexed only a single URL.
For instance, there is only one indexed page for this thread: site:http://www.vbseo.com/f4/too-many-pages-indexed-24533/ - Buscar con Google

I understand that each URL is unique. What I am concerned about is that the content for each post link will be the same as the content for the other 10 post links that will appear on that particular thread page. The only thing different is the URL and the anchor... the content would be exactly the same. Isn't this a big no-no?

I also understand brian's solution (thanks Brian). I just want to understand the suggestion Joe gave me, as he said that I should avoid duplicate content but the suggestion seems to cause more duplicated content than linking to a single post.

I promise that I am not trying to be difficult, just wanting to understand...

Search engines are smart enough to recognized references to the same page.

Anchors do not indicate new pages. They indicate only to "jump to" a particular place on the *same* page.

This will not result in any duplicate content.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Search engines are smart enough to recognized references to the same page.

Anchors do not indicate new pages. They indicate only to "jump to" a particular place on the *same* page.

This will not result in any duplicate content.

Outstanding, thanks Joe!