There’s a lot of talk these past couple days about some recent comments Matt Cutts of Google wrote on his own blog.

Cutts’ comments suggest that adding too many new URLs (pages) to a site can trigger an alarm, then he clarifies that (disingenuously, I think) on SE Roundtable by saying it only happens when a site adds “hundreds of thousands” of pages.

Well, I’ve been reading enough mailing lists, message boards, and blogs to have heard plenty of stories about such an alarm being triggered on much smaller URL expansions — like a couple hundred pages. Better yet, I have seen client sites trigger an alarm simply from completing a major site overhaul with a completely new URL structure (site architecture).

Whether it’s hundreds of pages or thousands of pages, the moral of the story is that being too aggressive in your content development can sound an alarm. Develop your content naturally, just like you build links naturally. What else? Don’t go overboard with anchor text. Don’t go overboard with keyword density. Don’t spam your page titles. Don’t overdo your reciprocal linking. Etc. Etc.

Come to think of it, the current state of SEO can be summed up best by one of the basic life lessons my mom repeated time after time when I was a kid:

Moderation in all things.

Yep, that’s SEO for you today. Remarkable lady, my mom.