Pages and content: how many, how long, and when to delete
Five pages out of 227 earned 75.2% of the traffic here, and nobody could have picked them in advance.
The instinct is to publish more. The measured reality is that traffic concentrates brutally: 134 of 227 URLs earned fewer than ten clicks in 267 days, while a handful carried the site. That does not argue for fewer pages, it argues for cheaper ones, and for spending real effort only where something has already shown signs of life. These guides cover page counts, word counts, pruning, and the difference between a thin page and a short one.
The 6 guides in this topic
- Should you start a blog for SEO? The measured answer: One site, both approaches, same period, same author. The gap is larger than anyone admits.
- Why your blog gets no traffic: Usually because it is competing for queries where a page that does the job wins, and no amount of writing changes that.
- How many pages does a website need for SEO?: More than you think, and the reason is about entry points rather than volume.
- What is thin content, and how thin is too thin?: Word count is not the test. Whether the page answers the query it targets is the test.
- Programmatic SEO: what it is, and the distribution nobody prints: Generating pages at scale works for a reason that is not the one usually given. Here is the full distribution from one site.
- Programmatic SEO mistakes that get whole sites handled as a block: Four failure modes, each survivable at sixty pages and fatal at ten thousand.
The evidence
Programmatic SEO, measured: 11 of 94 pages earned 88.6% of the clicks: The click distribution across 94 generated pages from one template, including the 20 that earned exactly zero in 267 days, and what the shape means before you generate ten thousand.