How Often to Post on a Programmatic SEO Blog: Daily and Monthly Amount.
If you Google "how many blogs to publish a day", thousands of pages recommend you maintain 2 posts per week publishing cadence.
Possible to do so on traditional SEO sites, but not a realistic option for sites that implement programmatic SEO. Because programmatic SEO sites generate thousands of pages at a go, a 2 blogs/week frequency will take a year to roll out all of their content.
So how many blogs are programmatic SEO sites allowed to publish daily?
To answer that, you will first need to understand crawl budget and how it influences blog publishing frequency.
After all, the goal isn't just to publish pages but to ensure your pages will be picked up by Google bots.
TL;DR
- Programmatic SEO sites can create numerous pages, but Google's crawl budget limits daily indexing.
- Crawl budget is the number of URLs Googlebot can crawl daily.
- Use Google Search Console's crawl stats to estimate your crawl budget.
- Consistent publishing can increase your crawl budget.
- The recommended daily post frequency should match your crawl budget, promoting consistency and preventing overwhelming Googlebot.
What’s Crawl Budget?
Google search essential guide defines crawl budget as "The amount of time and resources that Google devotes to crawling a site."
This also specifies the number of URLs on your website that Googlebot can crawl within a given timeframe.
The crawl budget is Google's way of ensuring they dedicate equal resources to meeting every site's indexing need.
Knowing the crawl budget assigned to your website helps determine the number of pages indexed on your site daily.
For instance, if your dedicated crawl budget is 10 pages/day, you can manually publish 100 pages, but Googlebot will index only 10. The rest will remain unindexed.
Measuring Your Site’s Crawl Budget
Unfortunately, no existing tool can tell you the specific crawl budget dedicated to your site. But you can get a few hints by analyzing "crawl stats" on the Google search console.
Back in 2018, the crawl stats dashboard looked like this:
And it did a good job of indicating the average crawl budget a site had in the last 90 days.
Then, an average score of 80 meant that a site could have just 80 of its pages indexed in one day.
But fast forward to 2023, to get to the crawl stats dashboard, you need to take this path: Google search console > setting > crawl stats > view report.
Not only is the path longer, but the dashboard has undergone a complete makeover.
The downside of this makeover is that Google no longer indicates the average number of pages crawled daily. Which makes it difficult to determine your crawl budget in 2023.
For example, in the image below, we analyzed a new programmatic SEO site that we launched on January 20, 2023 (new domain name, DA score 0) and observed that the site’s all-time highest number of crawl requests is 79 on January 25, 2023.
That stats show you how many crawl requests Google is doing per day but don't tell us the number of new pages indexed daily. Crawl requests have two purposes:
Refresh: it means that Google is crawling your content to find content to update, that's why it's very important to update your content regularly. The fresher your content, the higher you rank.
Discovery: it means that Google is crawling your content to find new pages to indexed.
As you can see, the image below indicates that 48% of your crawl budget is used to discover new pages on your site.
And that 48% translates to a maximum number of 24 pages to be indexed daily by Google, as you can see from the chart below. Here is a breakdown of the 94 pages indexed on this site from January 20, 2023 to February 14, 2023:
- 2 pages on January 24 (manual indexation request + sitemap submitted)
- 24 pages on January 25
- 10 pages on January 30
- 23 pages on February 5
- 11 pages on February 9
- 4 pages on February 14
This means that if you plan to manually published 1000 pages, only 15-24 of those pages would be indexed daily and start ranking on Google.
The good thing about crawl budgets is that the more you publish, the more it increases.
If Google observes that you’re reaching your maximum crawl budget daily, they will be forced to increase the limit for you.
Take this site called Content king as an example; back in 2016, they had their crawl budget at 100 pages/day.
And in 2018, it increased to 450 pages/day.
Google rewards your consistency by increasing your crawl budget, among many other things.
What’s the Best Daily Blog Posting Frequency for Programmatic SEO Sites?
As you can see from the crawl budget analysis, each site can publish thousands of pages in one day, but only a few will be indexed.
So, to answer the question: "How many blogs to post a day" we recommend you analyze your crawl history to identify the number of new pages crawled on your site daily.
If that number is 30, and you have 1,000 pages lying in wait, we recommend you pin your publications at 30 pages per day for the next 30 days.
But hold on a minute... Won’t it be easier to publish all 1,000 pages at a go?
It is. But we don’t recommend this strategy for two reasons:
Publishing in one go means other days of the month will be left dry. And you end up sacrificing consistency.
Google likes consistency; a blog that publishes new articles consistently for 30 days is more likely to rank than one that publishes all in one night.
As you can see, drip publishing is the right path to take.
Note: SEOmatic is one of few programmatic SEO software that provides a drip publishing feature. Click here to sign up now for FREE!
Publish in One Go or In Batches?
In a survey conducted by first site guide, bloggers who publish 20 posts per day reportedly saw a 30% increase in traffic, while those who do 50 per week recorded 70%.
What does this tell you? It means Google won't penalize you for publishing many pages in one go. Huffington Post reportedly publishes a blog every 58 seconds.
The key to publishing is consistency. So if you have many pages to post, we advise you to publish in batches by spreading them across multiple weeks to avoid being flagged as spam content by Google.
You can start with 30 pages a day the first month (depending on your crawl budget) and increase to 50 pages the second month when your crawl budget is increased.
This way, you give Googlebot and your audience something new to look forward to every day. Instead of overwhelming them at once.
Final Words
There’s no limit to the number of pages to post daily. The key for programmatic SEO sites is to decide on a daily publishing frequency that will help you maintain consistency. For new sites with <30 DA score, that number could be 10, 20 or even 30 pages daily.
Finally, publishing in batch ensures you don’t overwhelm Googlebot, making it easier to get your pages indexed faster.
And if you want a programmatic SEO software that can help with drip publishing, SEOmatic is right here for you. Click here to sign up for a free trial.
