How many mod_rewritten pages is too many?

[Hal Smith]

From what I could find. Lots of pages isn't inherently bad. In addition to the content creation and social benefits, having many pages allows you to target a lot more keywords with a lot more title tags.

When you get a lot of pages you need to pay more attention to your Googlebot crawl budget. There will be pages that Googlebot may crawl only once *ever* or maybe even not at all, depending on your pagerank. You need to make sure that your pages that get the most traffic and change most frequently get crawled more often. You can set priority and last-modified in your sitemap to make that happen. And you can "sculpt" your pagerank so that your important pages don't get PR 0. You also need to pay more attention to user experience. Google doesn't like it when a page ranks for something popular, but has little content: users end up unsatisfied. You have your navigational structure so that's good.

Things to keep in mind:
- make sure you have a good information architecture in place
- the url structure will be critical at that scale and you want to avoid serving the same content from multiple urls (you don't want 100,000 indexed urls)
- don't publish any of the "stub" pages
- consider carefully what you do with your high value pages - whether they are well-linked, good sources of traffic, important to structure, etc
- have a redirect plan in place

Hal Smith
URLdreamer Consultant