Publishing cadence vs depth: does a faster clock actually win?

Publishing cadence vs depth: does a faster clock actually win?

"Publish more often" is gospel for new sites. But does raw cadence correlate with growth once you control for total quality output?

— I compared 23 sites' first-year publishing frequency against their month-18 traffic, then tried to hold per-article depth roughly constant.
— Raw cadence correlated with traffic, but most of that vanished once I accounted for total word/effort volume: faster publishers simply produced more.
— Sites that published rarely but deeply often matched or beat high-cadence-but-shallow peers on a per-article basis.

The nuance: cadence per se looks like a proxy for total invested effort, not an independent factor. The algorithm doesn't appear to reward a metronome; it rewards accumulated useful coverage. "3x a week" only helps if each piece would have ranked on its own merits.

Caveat: depth normalization is crude (word count is a poor effort proxy); 23 sites is small.

Method note: cadence + output-volume regression against month-18 GSC clicks, 23 sites.

Confidence: low-to-medium