In an AskGooglebot session, an SEO professional asked John Mueller about index limits, and whether or not Google has any for static pages.
John answered that no, there is no limit. But, he wanted to dive into a couple of topics to further expand on this.
He said that Google can’t tell if a page is dynamic. So if you take a dynamic page that is originally something like .php, and change it to .html, it’s not going to matter. And it doesn’t matter to search engines either way.
John reiterated that they don’t have any limits for indexing, but they do try to focus resources in ways where they believe that it makes sense.
The Google algorithms will try to index pages in a logical process andthe process is fully automated.
John emphasized focusing on making the site “awesome,” so that they will be more likely to want to index every page on the site.
You can watch the video here:
John Mueller AskGooglebot Transcript
John 0:03
Today’s question is from DigitalMosaics who is asking: Is there a maximum limit on how many web pages with .html extension (static web pages) Google can index for one website?
Well, in short, no, there is no limit. But let’s take a quick moment to cover two related topics. First, static pages versus dynamic pages. When content is made available to search engines, they don’t know if it’s from a static page-so a file that was added and is never changed – or if it’s created by something on the server – so, a dynamic page. We can’t tell, and it doesn’t matter to search engines either way.
Sometimes, sites try to make dynamic pages appear to be static pages by adding an html extension. But that doesn’t change anything, there’s no need to do that. The other aspect is a limit for indexing. We don’t have any limits for indexing. However, we do try to focus our resources in places where we think they make sense.
With that in mind, our algorithms will generally try to focus indexing on pages that make sense to be indexed. So if it’s a completely new website, we probably won’t go off and index millions of pages. However, if we’ve seen that it’s worthwhile, we’ll be happy to do just that.
This process is fully automated. So if you’re building out your website, our advice would be to make sure it’s awesome, so that our algorithms easily understand that it’s worth spending a bit more time to get it all indexed, and shown in search. Thank you for the question. And till next episode.
