> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.livain.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # 97 blog posts per market, ten non-brand clicks: replacing a programmatic content library with thirteen pages - URL: https://www.livain.com/blog/programmatic-blog-library-ten-non-brand-clicks-consolidation/ - Published: 2026-10-20T07:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-20T06:59:59.000Z - Description: A home and living brand published 97 templated posts per market. Sixteen months later the library had earned ten non-brand clicks. What the consolidation to thirteen pages changed. - Author: Remco Livain - Tags: SEO, Content Strategy, Ecommerce, Home and Living Forty of them went live on the same day. That is the detail that told me everything before I had opened a single analytics export: a home and living brand I look after had ninety-seven blog posts on one of its European sites, and forty of them were published on one December afternoon. Sixteen months later, the whole library had earned ten clicks from search terms that were not the brand's own name. ### What ninety-seven posts actually bought The idea was reasonable enough when someone had it. The product sits in health-adjacent territory — sleeping position, recovery after an operation, pregnancy, reflux — so write a post for each question people ask, and let search do the rest. Three markets got the same treatment. Ninety-seven posts, ninety-two, ninety-three. Here is what the pages looked like under the hood. A median of 475 words. Seven numbered question headings. A FAQ block at the bottom where every answer began with "Yes, …". In the body text: no inline images, no internal links, no product links, no sources, and no call to action of any kind. Four featured images covered all ninety-seven posts, each one reused twenty to thirty times, and all four were AI renders that got the product's own geometry wrong. Search Console over sixteen months: about two thirds of all clicks went to the home page and the shop pages, and nearly all of those were people typing the brand name. The content library took roughly half of the impressions and converted them at one to two percent. Fifty-nine of the URLs had never had a single click. And four posts — four, out of ninety-seven — earned about two thirds of everything the blog did earn. > So we take 80% of 80 and 20% of 20 and end up with the 64/4 rule. So 64% of effects come from 4% of causes. Allan Dib writes that in *The 1-Page Marketing Plan* as a provocation. On this site it was arithmetic. Four of ninety-seven is 4.1%. Those four took 63% of the blog's clicks. The other ninety-three were not underperforming versions of the four. They were a different thing entirely: pages that existed so that a number would go up. ### Volume is not coverage Google has been explicit about this since the [March 2024 core update and spam policy changes](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies?ref=livain.com), which introduced [scaled content abuse](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies?ref=livain.com) as a named violation — generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than to help anyone. The policy is usually discussed as an AI-content problem. It isn't. A templated page produced by a person with a spreadsheet lands in exactly the same place. The test in [Google's own helpful-content guidance](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content?ref=livain.com) is whether the page leaves the reader feeling they have had a satisfying experience, and a 475-word answer that ends in "Yes, …" and sells nothing does not pass it from either direction. There is a second problem on health topics specifically. These were pages about reflux, post-operative recovery and pregnancy, with no author, no sources and no medical review anywhere on them. That is the category Google's rater guidance treats most strictly, and it is also simply bad practice. If you are going to write about how someone should sleep after an operation, you owe them a source. The commercial failure is quieter and, for a business, worse. None of those pages had a price, a product in context, or a way to buy. So even when one of them did rank — and a few did — the visitor landed on an article, read it, and left. The site's actual revenue came from people typing the brand name. The content had not widened the funnel. It had built a parallel one with no exit. ### Ninety-seven down to thirteen The rebuild took the ninety-seven posts in each market down to thirteen pages: four use-case hubs and nine deep guides. Everything else was set to draft, not deleted, and 301-redirected into whichever of the thirteen it belonged to — eighty-eight redirects in the first market, each one verified as a single hop to a 200. The new template inverts the old one. Answer the question first, properly and with sources. Then the product in context: real photographs rather than renders, the actual price pulled live from the shop, the size options, add to cart, real reviews with real names. A comparison table. A substantive FAQ. A sticky buy box on mobile. The page is both the answer and the shop, because for this kind of purchase they were never two separate visits. Two things I would flag for anyone doing the same. First, keeping the nine strongest URLs intact matters more than the redirect map — those four winners already had position and history, and you do not throw that away to make the new structure prettier. Second, draft rather than delete. A redirect from a drafted post still works, and if the consolidation is wrong you can see what you had. This is the same discipline I wrote about when [ten minutes of querying killed a content sprint](https://www.livain.com/blog/ten-minutes-of-querying-killed-the-content-sprint/) before it started, and when I rebuilt my own thin FAQ pages into [a single consolidated hub](https://www.livain.com/blog/query-augmentation-faq-hub-consolidation-canonical-tags/) rather than deleting them. It is also, in the end, the lesson from [deciding what not to index](https://www.livain.com/blog/the-work-was-deciding-what-not-to-index/): the work is the subtraction. ### The question worth asking before the next sprint If you have a content library and you are not sure whether it is working, you do not need an audit to find out. Pull the last sixteen months of Search Console, strip out every query containing your brand name, and see what is left. If it is a number you could count on your hands, the library is not reaching new people — it is being read by people who already knew you. Then open any three posts at random and ask what a reader is supposed to *do* at the bottom of them. If the honest answer is "leave", you do not have thin content. You have a very large, very tidy exit. Ninety-seven pages took eighteen months to build and one afternoon to redirect. The four that worked were there the whole time. ### Sources & further reading **External** [Google Search Central — What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies?ref=livain.com) [Google Search Central — Spam policies for Google web search (scaled content abuse)](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies?ref=livain.com) [Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content?ref=livain.com) Allan Dib, *The 1-Page Marketing Plan* **Related posts** [Ten minutes of querying killed the content sprint](https://www.livain.com/blog/ten-minutes-of-querying-killed-the-content-sprint/) [Query augmentation, an FAQ hub and canonical tags](https://www.livain.com/blog/query-augmentation-faq-hub-consolidation-canonical-tags/) [The work was deciding what not to index](https://www.livain.com/blog/the-work-was-deciding-what-not-to-index/) [Beautiful before the site had traffic](https://www.livain.com/blog/beautiful-before-the-site-had-traffic/)