❯ /seo whould it be bad to launch with a bigger
number of programmatic seo articles?

● Launching with a Large pSEO Article Count — Risk
  Analysis

  Short answer: yes, it can hurt, especially on a new
   domain. Here's why and how to mitigate it.

  ---
  The core risk: Google's Helpful Content System
  (HCS)

  Google's HCS evaluates sites holistically, not page
   by page. If a large portion of your site looks
  templated, thin, or machine-generated, the entire
  domain can get a HCS classifier applied —
  suppressing all your pages in rankings, not just
  the bad ones.

  This is especially dangerous at launch because you
  have zero authority or trust signals to buffer the
  risk.

  ---
  Specific risks at scale

  Risk: Thin content
  What happens: Pages with the same template, minimal

    unique data, and short text → Google treats as
    doorway pages
  ────────────────────────────────────────
  Risk: Crawl budget waste
  What happens: New domains get limited crawl budget.

    500 thin pages = Google never properly indexes
    your 10 important pages
  ────────────────────────────────────────
  Risk: Indexing cliff
  What happens: Google may crawl but refuse to index
    many pages, then slow-crawl everything — your
  best
     pages stay invisible for months
  ────────────────────────────────────────
  Risk: Duplicate content signals
  What happens: Highly similar templates across
  cities
    trigger near-duplicate filters
  ────────────────────────────────────────
  Risk: Sudden large crawl spike
  What happens: Looks unnatural on a new domain; can
    trigger quality review

  ---
  What makes pSEO safe at scale

  Your content avoids penalty if each page has
  genuine differentiation:

  - Unique data per page (your DuckDB serving tables
  with real city-level stats — this is good)
  - Enough text variation that pages don't read as
  identical
  - Real user intent fulfilled (someone searching
  "padel court cost Hamburg" gets Hamburg-specific
  numbers, not generic copy)
  - Thin pages are not indexed (use noindex on
  low-data cities)

  ---
  Recommended launch approach

  Your staggered publishing (articles_per_day) is
  already correct. Here's how to calibrate it:

  1. Phase 1 — 20–50 pages: Your best cities (highest
   population, highest search volume). Monitor Google
   Search Console: are they getting indexed within
  2–4 weeks?
  2. Phase 2 — expand once indexing is healthy: If
  GSC shows 80%+ of Phase 1 pages indexed and you're
  seeing impressions, scale to next tier.
  3. Never index a page without real data: If a
  city's DuckDB row has null/empty fields that would
  produce generic text, noindex it until data exists.
  4. Target ≤30% of your site being pSEO at launch:
  Mix in some hand-crafted cornerstone content (e.g.
  "How to build a padel court in Germany") to signal
  editorial intent.

  ---
  The counter-argument (when more is fine)

  If your pages have very strong data differentiation
   per city and your domain already has some
  authority (backlinks, existing traffic), launching
  with 200–500 pages is not unusual for
  location-based pSEO. The risk scales with:

  - How similar the pages look to each other
  - How new/authoritative the domain is
  - Whether the data is genuinely unique vs. filler

  ---
  Bottom line for Padelnomics

  Given it's a new domain with no existing authority,
   I'd launch with:
  - 50–100 highest-quality cities first (the ones
  with real DuckDB data, not nulls)
  - Ramp to full scale over 2–3 months, using
  articles_per_day as your throttle
  - Add noindex to any city page where data would
  produce near-identical content to another city

  The indexing rate in GSC will tell you clearly
  whether Google likes what it sees before you commit
   thousands of pages.
