I see people ask this question several times every year. It almost never changes, except for the numbers. “I’ve written (purchased) [X] blog posts. I’m ready to launch my site. Should I publish them all at once or a few at a time?”
I’ll say right now there is no single, universally correct answer (in my humblest opinion). But if you substitute “product listings” for “blog posts”, you’re more likely to say, “publish them all at once!”
So why should anyone hesitate about publishing all the blog posts at once? Let me suggest a few reasons to drip the content out rather than blast it.
Three Reasons to Drip Publish Blog Posts
You should be creative enough to find more than 3 reasons to drip your content. If you’re writing it all yourself (which you should be doing), then dripping a stockpile of content you’ve built up buys you some time. But as time can be squandered or productive people may elect to turn to other projects, I decided to not include this in my list of 3 good [SEO] reasons to drip content.
1 – RSS feeds
If you’re publishing the blog posts for the sake of creating your own links, you probably don’t care about who finds and reads the blog posts. I suspect they won’t be very high quality.
But if you take the time to create truly good content, or to pay for it, then think about how many RSS subscribers you’ll have in 2 years versus right now. The new site has no RSS subscribers. It could have thousands in 2 years.
If you publish all your blog posts NOW, most of them will be pushed out of the RSS feeds and those future subscribers will never see them anyway.
So, do you want subscribers to see the content or not? Earning subscribers takes time (so far as I know). So do you lead with “the best” content in order to earn those subscribers or do you lead with “the worst” content to save the best content for future subscribers? And if you lead with the lowest quality content, how many potential subscribers will you NOT earn?
You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t – so don’t dwell too long on these calculations. Or, as my good friend Admiral Akbar says, “It’s a trap!”
You should make the decision on the basis of where you intend to go with the site, not on the basis of what content you have ready to go (in my opinion).
2 – Search Engine Crawling
Search engines will gladly accept your XML sitemap file. They may even crawl all [X] posts. Maybe.
The site has no PageRank-like value. So even if you can get all that stuff crawled, will it be indexed?
If the content is of minimally acceptable quality, then it will be indexed. So, in theory, the site will inherit a certain (small) amount of PageRank-like value from being indexed. That’s the way (I understand) PageRank works (normally).
But the odds favor some or all of the content NOT being indexed right away. So that’s potential PageRank-like value the site WON’T inherit and benefit from. So now you’ve put out all this content and it’s not helping.
Dripping content slowly (or quickly) establishes a publication pattern that brings the crawlers back. This isn’t just some wild theory I’ve cooked up – it’s been confirmed by search engine representatives, who say their algorithms adjust crawling schedules based on how frequently they see content published on a site.
3 – Who Is the Content Intended for?
Coming back to the intent behind the content, if it’s only intended for crawlers (presumably on a linking site) then you might as well publish it all at once.
But if it’s intended for human consumption then I suggest that you have another reason NOT to publish it all at once. The more content you have, the less likely anyone will read it all (in one sitting).
And that includes you (or whomever edits the content). So while it may be very good content, it probably needs to be edited. You can try to do it all at once in a massive, marathon session. Randy Ray has done this for clients. He’s very good at it. But it’s a lot of work, it’s exhausting work, and the longer the project goes on the more likely the editor will miss something near the end of the project that would be caught early in the project.
We’re all human. Some of us are better editors than others. But we all get tired and make mistakes.
So if the content is intended for people, I think you should drip it. I would NOT drip product listings. Blog articles, however, are supposed to be interesting, informative, entertaining, or useful. How much interesting, entertaining, useful information does the average person need at any one time?
There Are Technical Issues, Too
If you publish 100 blog posts all at once, how are you categorizing them? What mitigation strategies are you using to cope with Website Subduction? Subduction is the process by which blog posts are pushed deeper into the site. The deeper content will be crawled less often and is less likely to attract real visitors, especially through search results.
Rapid subduction may be solely responsible for why content is never indexed, or quickly drops out of search indexes. If you’re publishing too much at one time, you’ll need to wait longer for the search engines to decide to crawl and index that content.
This was less of an issue a few years ago. But over the past 12 to 18 months a growing number of people have complained about being unable to get content indexed.
You can compensate to some extent by getting (building? buying?) links to newly published content. But that adds more work (and expense) to an already large project.
When you publish a large number of pages, how well do you interlink them? I’d say many marketers are now more attentive to interlinking than they were in the past, but how thoughtful is your interlinkage if you’re publishing dozens or hundreds of pages at once?
I don’t think you’ll do as good a job as you would if you nurtured the content piece by piece over months or years. You’re not putting much time into the thought process.
Categorization, subduction, interlinkage – these are all very important aspects to Website design. As a site grows its needs in each area changes. It’s great to think about launching a fully organized, populated site all at once. You can “set it and forget it”, but how often does that work in real life?
You’ll probably have decided that the 80/20 rule means most of your content won’t earn traffic or links – so you’ve already written it off before it’s even published. But if you publish each post on a measured scale, you can publicize it via social media, give it time to be the “featured” new content, give readers a chance to see and appreciate something new and thoughtful, and give the algorithms a chance to learn a little more about the site.
And if you don’t like the direction the algorithms are going, it’s easier to make changes with a drip strategy than with a blast strategy.
Site Quality Depends on Your State of Mind
In an abstract sense, your mood and your rationality have more to do with the (search algorithm perceived) quality of your site than anything else in the mix. The algorithms are judging what you decide to put on the page and how you choose to connect the pages to each other. You might do it one way on Monday and a different way on Friday. The subtlest of variations in your habitual page/site design strategies can make HUGE differences.
The Perfectionist will spend weeks or months developing the content. They might look at every detail 10 times. They may pay 2-3 people to look at details. Design and editorial committees are heavily biased toward perfectionism. Design-by-committee is slow, inefficient, and – well, I’ll leave it there.
The Corner Cutter is the small business owner who doesn’t have time to do things right, or the affiliate marketer who just wants to get the site up and making money as quickly as possible. Corner Cutters may spin content, but cheap content, write content themselves, or otherwise churn it out and worry about fixing it later. Some people who cut corners are very effective and they achieve their goals. I don’t know what percentage of Corner Cutters do well enough, but we’ve all seen examples of successful and failed corner cutting.
The Revisionist throws content on the site and then attempts to improve it before releasing the site to search engines (and people). Revisionists may design by committee, or they may buy cheap content. They intend to refine whatever goes up before the site “goes live”. They just want to get something up there as quickly as possible.
A perfectionist approach might work very well with both drip and blast publishing strategies.
A corner cutting approach is less likely to go with a drip strategy. In my experience, these people tend to blast as much content onto a site as they can and then they move on to the next project.
Either approach can be refined by a revisionist strategy. It’s not so much as third alternative as a new state of mind.
You Know the Quality Level When the Algorithms Reject It
Regardless of how you get the content on to the site, if the search engines don’t index and rank it despite your investing time and effort in submitting sitemaps, individual URLs, etc., you MUST accept that there is either a technical issue or a quality issue.
If you can confirm that Bingbot or Googlebot is fetching the content and it’s not being indexed, then it’s 99% a quality problem. Your opinion of the quality of your content is irrelevant. The search engines don’t take your word for it.
So, if I were planning a 100-page site, I’d rather drip the content so I can adjust how it’s created and organized as I go along. If I see a problem with the algorithms rejecting content, I want to stop and tweak my production method.
Conclusion
I cringe every time I agree to work on a project where the client wants all the content written in advance. I take the money because it’s not my site. But that’s not how I would want to build out the site.
Randy Ray has worked on a lot of these projects. He can do a great job of mapping out the content. But that’s only where the work begins. A massive blast-publication strategy is a very risky strategy. You should only use trusted writers and editors, in my opinion. And you should only use optimization strategies you have used before with great success.
Blasting a large number of pages all at once creates challenges most people (in my experience) don’t think about. And if they’re not thinking about those strategies they’re not mitigating them.
So even if there is no single “best” or “right” way to make this decision, my instinct is always to lean toward publishing content 1 page at a time when I have the time and energy to do it that way.