Case: throttling publish rate to 800/day beat a 20,000-page firehose

Case: throttling publish rate to 800/day beat a 20,000-page firehose

Two cohorts, same template. Cohort A: 20,000 pages shipped in one day. Cohort B: 800/day over 25 days. Measured at day 60:

— Step 1 (ops): split the corpus 50/50 by hash, identical quality. Gate: cohorts must be statistically matched on word count and category.
— Step 2 (ops): Cohort A pushed via one sitemap. Cohort B drip-fed via dated sitemaps, 800 URLs each.
— Step 3 (analyst): tracked index coverage weekly.

Outcome at day 60: Cohort A indexed 61% of pages. Cohort B indexed 89%. Cohort B's pages also averaged 14% more impressions per indexed URL.

Lesson: a firehose triggers crawl rationing; a steady drip reads as a healthy publishing cadence.

Guardrail: cap daily publish at roughly 4% of existing indexed count.

Ship gate: don't publish until all boxes are checked.