120 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
120 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
❯ /seo whould it be bad to launch with a bigger
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number of programmatic seo articles?
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● Launching with a Large pSEO Article Count — Risk
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Analysis
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Short answer: yes, it can hurt, especially on a new
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domain. Here's why and how to mitigate it.
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---
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The core risk: Google's Helpful Content System
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(HCS)
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Google's HCS evaluates sites holistically, not page
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by page. If a large portion of your site looks
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templated, thin, or machine-generated, the entire
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domain can get a HCS classifier applied —
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suppressing all your pages in rankings, not just
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the bad ones.
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This is especially dangerous at launch because you
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have zero authority or trust signals to buffer the
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risk.
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---
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Specific risks at scale
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Risk: Thin content
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What happens: Pages with the same template, minimal
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unique data, and short text → Google treats as
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doorway pages
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────────────────────────────────────────
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Risk: Crawl budget waste
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What happens: New domains get limited crawl budget.
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500 thin pages = Google never properly indexes
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your 10 important pages
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────────────────────────────────────────
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Risk: Indexing cliff
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What happens: Google may crawl but refuse to index
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many pages, then slow-crawl everything — your
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best
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pages stay invisible for months
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────────────────────────────────────────
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Risk: Duplicate content signals
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What happens: Highly similar templates across
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cities
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trigger near-duplicate filters
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────────────────────────────────────────
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Risk: Sudden large crawl spike
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What happens: Looks unnatural on a new domain; can
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trigger quality review
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---
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What makes pSEO safe at scale
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Your content avoids penalty if each page has
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genuine differentiation:
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- Unique data per page (your DuckDB serving tables
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with real city-level stats — this is good)
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- Enough text variation that pages don't read as
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identical
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- Real user intent fulfilled (someone searching
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"padel court cost Hamburg" gets Hamburg-specific
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numbers, not generic copy)
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- Thin pages are not indexed (use noindex on
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low-data cities)
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---
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Recommended launch approach
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Your staggered publishing (articles_per_day) is
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already correct. Here's how to calibrate it:
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1. Phase 1 — 20–50 pages: Your best cities (highest
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population, highest search volume). Monitor Google
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Search Console: are they getting indexed within
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2–4 weeks?
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2. Phase 2 — expand once indexing is healthy: If
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GSC shows 80%+ of Phase 1 pages indexed and you're
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seeing impressions, scale to next tier.
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3. Never index a page without real data: If a
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city's DuckDB row has null/empty fields that would
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produce generic text, noindex it until data exists.
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4. Target ≤30% of your site being pSEO at launch:
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Mix in some hand-crafted cornerstone content (e.g.
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"How to build a padel court in Germany") to signal
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editorial intent.
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---
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The counter-argument (when more is fine)
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If your pages have very strong data differentiation
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per city and your domain already has some
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authority (backlinks, existing traffic), launching
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with 200–500 pages is not unusual for
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location-based pSEO. The risk scales with:
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- How similar the pages look to each other
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- How new/authoritative the domain is
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- Whether the data is genuinely unique vs. filler
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---
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Bottom line for Padelnomics
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Given it's a new domain with no existing authority,
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I'd launch with:
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- 50–100 highest-quality cities first (the ones
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with real DuckDB data, not nulls)
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- Ramp to full scale over 2–3 months, using
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articles_per_day as your throttle
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- Add noindex to any city page where data would
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produce near-identical content to another city
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The indexing rate in GSC will tell you clearly
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whether Google likes what it sees before you commit
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thousands of pages.
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