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John Mueller from Google addressed a question regarding the effects of enlarging a website by tenfold. His response should make anyone think twice before significantly increasing their site’s size, as this change will lead Google to view it as a completely new website and initiate a re-evaluation.
One reason for site migration is merging two websites into a single, larger one. Another cause for increased size is adding a substantial number of new products.
On the SEO Office Hours podcast, a question was raised about the impact of dramatically expanding a product portfolio:
“What effect does expanding our product catalog from 10,000 to 100,000 items have on SEO performance?”
This question highlights a scenario where a website grows tenfold.
Here’s Mueller’s response:
“You don’t need to seek out complex explanations. When you significantly expand a website, like increasing its size by a factor of 10, the site will inherently change. The original site will only make up 10% of the new version. Therefore, it’s natural to expect search engines to reassess how they rank and display your site. Essentially, it becomes a new site.
It’s wise to approach such changes strategically. This shouldn’t be viewed primarily as an SEO issue.”
Mueller suggested that the issue of how Google displays a website is not primarily an SEO problem, though many SEOs might see it differently. For them, any factor affecting how a search engine presents a site is an SEO concern. Mueller might have meant that this should be approached more as a strategic issue.
Nevertheless, Mueller’s response indicates that a dramatic increase in a site’s size could prompt Google to re-evaluate it, effectively treating it as a new website. This could potentially be an unfavorable outcome.
Although Mueller did not specify the exact duration of this re-evaluation process, he has mentioned in the past that it could take several months. Four years ago, he said:
“It takes a lot of time for us to understand how a website fits in with the rest of the Internet. …And that’s something that can easily take a couple of months, up to half a year, or sometimes even longer for us to recognize significant changes in the site’s overall quality.”
The takeaway is that if you’re planning significant content growth, it might be wise to do so in phases to avoid triggering a lengthy sitewide evaluation.
Original news from SearchEngineJournal
