The Old Advice vs. the New Advice in short:

• Then: Publishing a lot of pages at once could raise red flags and prompt manual reviews from Google. The recommendation was to push out new content in smaller chunks to avoid issues.
• Now: There is no issue with mass publishing tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages simultaneously as long as they are high-quality content. Artificially delaying release can do more harm than good regarding SEO performance.
• The bottom line: Don’t sit on your content because of outdated advice.

For years the understanding has been that it was better to publish content in chunks rather than mass publish hundreds or even thousands of pages.

This was because releasing large amounts of content at once would raise red flags at Google, which could result in your content being marked as possible spam. 

However, Google changed its stance on the matter back in 2017 when John Mueller, the Search Advocate for Google, said there was no issue with mass publishing pages. 

When asked about the subject in March 2023, the same John Mueller doubled down on his point, saying:

“If it's great content [...], why would you artificially delay it?”

The best practice regarding an SEO publishing strategy has been debated among SEO professionals and publishers for years. Now that we have a response to this specific matter, we will explore the consequences and impact this has on publishing SEO content.

“Should I publish them slowly?” – SEO habits are slow to die

Let’s look at the context for the recent response concerning mass publication of content. The conversation started when Vanshit Rubber, with the Twitter handle @dead8y3, tweeted at John Mueller, asking him directly: 

“How can I launch a site with approx 8000 Pages? Should I publish them slowly? I want them indexed.”

To which John Mueller answered:

“If it’s great content that the internet has missed and which users have been waiting for, why would you artificially delay it?”

You can se the original conversation from Twitter below:

As previously stated, the practice of flagging mass publications as possible spam at Google was abandoned years ago. SEO habits are slow to die, and the debate continues; many still believe Google punishes large-scale content releases.

This means people often advise you to stagger your release to avoid getting “slapped by search engines” and falling into the “spam patterns” category.

The reality is that this advice, though given in good faith, is outdated and wrong.

How does Mass Publishing benefit your SEO Strategy?

The most important takeaway from the tweet is that you can publish as many pages as you want, at the same time, without risking punishment from Google. Mass publication is in itself not considered spam.

This is great because text generators powered by AI, like ChatGPT and SEO.ai, make creating large quantities of content easier; therefore, publishing in bulk is more relevant than ever.

Especially since every content piece you delay is basically a piece not gaining traction, not providing brand awareness, and not creating traffic to your site. In essence not doing anything.

Apart from that, publishing a substantial amount of content can yield numerous benefits for your website or online platform: 

• It can increase your organic traffic as more content means more keywords, which increases the likelihood of your content appearing in a user's search results. 
• Having a larger content volume creates more opportunities for a single piece to become popular or even go viral. 
• Publishing more content can enhance audience engagement as followers have more material to interact with while also providing greater potential for social media sharing. 
• Having more content on your site can encourage visitors to stay longer and explore more, ultimately improving their overall user experience. 
• A considerable amount of content can significantly increase leads, and companies with over 200 blog articles are generating five times more leads than those with ten or fewer posts. 
• Analytics from each piece provides valuable information on what resonates with your audience, which enables you to refine your writing style and content over time. With mass publication, you get there faster.

And finally, remember that it doesn’t matter how awesome your content is if no one can find or see it, so being able to get everything out there at once is fantastic.

Should I always publish SEO content in bulk?

Being able to mass publish without raising flags is great, but there might be other reasons to stagger your content. 

Therefore it’s best to consider what you want to achieve with a large-scale content release and weigh this against your other considerations.

After all, it is still considered best practice in SEO to publish content frequently, so if you don’t have more content to publish for a long while, it may be better to stagger at least some of your content. This will give you time to produce more content.

Publishing content regularly is still important because it:

• Can boost your website’s SEO, as search engines tend to prioritize fresh content. 
• Is crucial for effective SEO, as posting a large batch of articles and then going quiet for several months is much less beneficial than publishing consistent content weekly or monthly.
• Is an effective way to attract visitors back to your website, especially when you stick to a consistent schedule they can rely on. 
• Can establish your brand's reliability and trustworthiness, as visitors can see you have a long history of delivering good work through years of weekly blog posts or other content. 
• Offers opportunities to cover a wider variety of topics, appealing to a larger audience, and dipping into seasonal content as well as trending topics can generate even more traffic.

Content doesn't necessarily have the same purpose or function on different websites. For example, you will usually find both product pages and supporting keyword-focused SEO content on a webshop.

Typically these types of pages should just be published as soon as possible, and you should keep publishing content regularly.

On the other hand, if you have something like a travel blog, the posts are the product. Flooding your site with 100 or, indeed, 1,000 posts at once might not be in your best interest as it will make it difficult for your readers to engage with all your content.

After all, you want them to read everything, right?

In this case publishing your content a few pieces at a time, on a schedule, makes it easy to read all your content and exciting to follow your blog. It motivates your audience to check back with your site to see what’s new, generating returning visitors who, in time, may become subscribers.

So to find out whether you should release your content all at once, start by asking yourself: Why wait? What do you gain from not posting the content right away? 

Things to consider when embracing large-scale content releases

Although it is safe, SEO-wise, to publish thousands of pages at one time, you do need be aware of the Google Bot; the algorithm crawling every website to detect new high-quality content to index and rank.

Ask yourself: When do you expect the Google Crawler to visit your site, and how many articles do you usually publish? If it isn’t visiting your site regularly, It might not index all your content at once even though you have published them, mainly if you only publish a few pieces at a time.

To help the crawler, you might want to look into improving your sites’ crawlability by:

1. Updating the XML sitemap and ensuring internal linking between related pages.
2. Using descriptive and unique page titles and meta descriptions. This makes it easier for search engines to understand what each page is about and how it should be indexed.
3. Optimizing your site's load speed, as search engine crawlers may be unable to access all of your site's content if it takes too long to load.

Next, you should notice this line in John Mueller’s response: 

“If it’s great content that the internet has missed and which users have been waiting for[…].”

Is it? Is your content that good?

This is important because his response refers to the general policy at Google where content should reflect expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or E-E-A-T for short.

This policy goes for all kinds of content, no matter how it was created or indeed generated, and meeting these requirements is what Google defines as high-quality content.

So before pressing “publish”, ask yourself whether the content is high quality. If not, you might not get the results you are hoping for, no matter whether you publish everything at once or stagger your posts, publishing them in smaller chunks.

The new SEO Publishing Strategy,

The old advice of slowly trickling content into the index to avoid raising red flags with Google, is no longer relevant. Instead, the new direction suggests publishing thousands of pages at once is acceptable if they are high quality. 

This shift in SEO publishing strategy has several implications:

• Impact on consistency and frequency of publishing: Rather than focusing on producing content at a steady rate to avoid suspicion, publishers can focus on creating high-quality content without feeling pressured to release it gradually.

• Importance of building a consistent publishing schedule: Consistency in quality and frequency of publication remains vital for maintaining audience engagement.

• Limitations of old SEO strategies in current search engine algorithms: Older tactics like artificial delay may actually harm websites' rankings rather than benefit them under current search engine algorithms.

• Shift towards semantic search and natural language processing: The emphasis is now more on providing valuable information directly related to user queries.

If you are struggling to create an SEO publishing strategy, try the text generator in SEO.ai. It might not do all the work for you, but it will get you started and ensure your strategy aligns with your keywords and answers relevant questions.

You might even get some new content ideas in the process.

Try it now