The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Let’s say you’ve decided that a huge website covering every aspect of peeling a banana needs to be published and that you are the right person for the job. You’ve done the research, you’ve picked your keywords, and you’ve put together an awesome plan for the website. How many pages per day should you publish?

I’m not talking about blog posts. I’m talking about web pages. Actual content pages of your website.

There are two types of mistakes new webmasters can make with the rate of publishing their web pages.

• Too often
• and not often enough

Both of these mistakes are easy to make.

Why You Shouldn’t Publish Web Pages Too Often

If you publish hundreds or thousands of web pages at a time you are likely to make some huge mistakes. First, you’ll have no way of knowing what you are doing that is working if you manage to get some of your pages to rank #1. What is your control group? It’s best to go slow so that you can measure each activity you perform as you perform them. Then, you have a much better chance of figuring out what is working and what isn’t.

Secondly, if you publish too many pages at once, you may very well get flagged by Google as a spammer and your web pages could end up at the bottom of the SERP heap. That would be disastrous.

Why You Should Publish Web Pages Every Day

A much lesser problem is not publishing often enough. You won’t be penalized for publishing one page a year, but you’ll spend a lifetime trying to figure out what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. As often as search algorithms change, you’ll probably never figure it out.

The best content plan is to publish in moderation. You want to publish often enough that you can test new techniques and strategies without destroying the old ones you know are working. But you also don’t want to publish too much too fast. So my recommendation is to publish no more than 5-10 pages a day, at most. 10 pages a day might be too much to tackle if you are on your first website. At the least, you want to publish one new page per day, or one every other day.

Every time you update your website the search bots come and recrawl it. The search engines then index new pages and re-index any that might have changed since the last time you updated your website. By publishing often, you ensure that you have a steady content publishing stream that keeps your website in the search engines’ eyes. And if you are on the search radar, you are in front of visitors’ eyes too.

A 404 error page is a page a web browser shows someone who clicks on a link to a page that no longer exists. This typically happens when a webmaster deletes a page or moves a page and forgets to redirect the old page to the new page. If you have too many 404 error pages your site visitors will begin to lose trust in you.

If you are deleting pages and not redirecting them to other pages then you’ll end up with 404 error pages. This might be a good time to review what happens when you publish a new page on your website or blog.

1. If you are using ping services then you are pinging those services every time you create a new page. Those pings create new links to your new pages. Delete those pages and your visitors will only see a 404 error page.
2. Subscribers to your RSS feed receive instant notification every time you create a new web page.
3. Directories that list your website or blog will often link to your latest post or page.
4. The search engines crawl those pages and index them in the search engines.

A 404 error page here and there won’t hurt you, but if subscribers and other readers to your website discover too many 404 error pages on your website, they’ll eventually stop trust you. You’ll look unprofessional. You want to keep those at a minimum.