Link List SEO / Seppuku

[Halfdeck]

I've been reading your blog

Oh so someone's reading my blog

isn't that better than missing out on that keyword traffic completely?

Sure. That's possible too; that's why I suggested a temporary test. Just having a couple extra pages in the main index probably won't mean a huge boost in traffic and if the keywords targeted by those pages are competitive, you may not rank high enough to see a noticeable difference. (Remember to write a unique set of robots disallows for Googlebot and MSNBot though, since MSNbot is much less demanding than Googlebot)

Still, I would at least think about disallowing "detail" pages like:

pervespace.com/xxx-links/executive-office-perks-490.html
pervespace.com/xxx-links/butt-fucking-movies-1699.html

As you get more backlinks, you can slowly remove the disallow and let the site expand while keeping 90% of the pages in the main index.

My personal experience is pages in the supplemental index really don't draw alot of traffic, first because if other pages in the main index are more relevant for a search term, they come up first. Second, Google doesn't index words/phrases in the supplemental and main index the same way (for the supplemental index, its more like a "compressed summary") so that a supplemental page may rank for fewer long tails than you want it to.

I had a site with 25K pages in the supplemental index and daily search traffic was just around 150/day. Yeah, its better than nothing, but that kind of traffic isn't enough to generate even 2 sales/month.

Here's an article on how John Scott saw an increase of 7k uniques/day after trimming down content (not a scientic test by any means, but something to think about).

creating a ton of pages with the hopes that a few of them will find some hits.

I hear ya, and its worth playing around with, but I think the best SEO is about creating a site you yourself will visit every day, with simple site navigation that doesn't make you click 10 x to get to where you wanna go.

Every single high-ranking site I can think of (Youtube, Wikipedia, del.icio.us) have a high number of daily visits. That's not just because Wikipedia ranks on the first page for everything under the sun; its because people are hooked on those sites and visit them on a daily basis. That kind of stickiness is the mother of organic links and high search engine rankings.