Indexing too many pages good or bad?

Question

We have a football website, in the website each football match has a separate page (for match details), and we decided to make unique title for each match page.

Now I find many of these matches indexed on google with more than 5000 pages, but I am worried after reading about possible Panda Penalty (which I know nothing about).

The matches pages have unique content, there is no duplicate pages, but there are many shallow upcoming matches pages with no scores or match events, just team names, date & location.

From Google point of view, is this bad practice or good? should I prevent indexing on matches pages?

Answer 1

Google would be happy to index billions of very unique web pages, but it hates indexing multiple URLs that point to exactly the same content.

For your match pages, you need to make sure the information is unique enough.

If one page has this content:

This football event just happened between (insert team name here) and 
(insert other team name here). Here are the scores:

(insert score here) points, and (insert score here) points

The winner is (insert winning team here)

and if subsequent pages contain the exact same content in the same order as above except that the items in brackets are replaced with different values, then you are actually participating in content spinning.

Here's one link to content spinning: https://www.creativecali.com/bad-seo-content-spinning/

If you really want to index all your pages, at least try to incorporate some unique content. For example, on one page, introduce the team if it is their first time playing, and on another page, talk about how the team reached their score, and maybe on another page, explain why there's such a large gap in the score. etc.

Answer 2

I'm head of SEO for a website with a similar structure to your own: The with large amounts of content coming from the same template but being filled out by Event details.

Google will choose whether a page is worth indexing or not. If it deems a page too sparse on content, it will drop it from the index.

There are penalties for bad linking and bad content. I have never seen Google penalise a site for sparse/empty pages. As long as your templated pages are unique and the information on the content rich pages is well optimised then you're fine.

With over 2 mil hits a month and tens of thousands of templated pages, I've had zero problems letting Google index and choose which pages it wants to list. The busy ones tend to rank 1st for their keywords and the empty ones are simply dropped until the next time Google finds content there. If you were hit with a manual action you'd see it in the Search Console. Algorithm penalties would be obvious on your top ranking keywords - but are completely reversible by making changes to your design.

As a side note - it sounds like you've done some great on-page SEO. Have you considered embedding Schema.org data to encourage rich snippets/cards to be created?

Answer 3

Titles are supposed to be unique for each page. That's what titles are for! To differentiate one page and its contents from another.

Does Wikipedia concern itself with different titles on its millions of pages? No.

Answer 4

Does your webpages deserve to be indexed? Do them give something useful to an user?

If not, Google won't penalize your website, it will completely ignore those pages, meaning they won't be indexed at all.