Two competing sites, same niche: one went deep, one went broad. Five-year split

Two competing sites, same niche: one went deep, one went broad. Five-year split

Question: depth (fewer, exhaustive pages) versus breadth (many shallower pages) — which compounds? A natural experiment from two scraped competitors.

What I observed: in one hobby niche, Site A published ~140 articles averaging 3,100 words; Site B published ~1,050 articles averaging 700 words over the same five years. Using public visibility-index data and a 500-keyword overlap sample, Site A ranked top-10 for 61% of shared keywords; Site B for 38% — despite Site B having ~5x the page count and similar referring-domain counts.

Caveat: this is observational, not experimental. The two sites differ in team, brand, and link profile in ways I can't fully control for, and the keyword sample is mine, not exhaustive. Depth may correlate with editorial quality rather than causing rank.

Method note: scraped sitemaps + word counts + a third-party visibility index + a 500-keyword shared cohort. Two sites, no causal claim.

Confidence: low — a vivid correlation, not evidence of cause.