Google indexed 4 of my 126 pages, then AdSense called the site "low value content"
Four. Google has crawled 126 pages on my site and indexed exactly four of them. Then AdSense rejected the whole thing for "low value content." Both happened in my first month with tamethebot.com — and honestly, both were fair.
It's a free library of copy-paste AI prompts organized by profession — 90 prompt pages, 15 profession pages, a few guides. No course, no signup. A teacher, a marketer, or a freelancer lands on the page for their job and gets prompts that actually work.
The idea still holds. Most "prompt engineering" content is written for developers, or it's so generic it's useless. Non-coders don't want to learn prompt syntax — they just want the prompt.
But I made a classic mistake: I optimized for "ship lots of pages" over "make each page earn its place." Reading my own pages back, too many follow the same template — same structure, same rhythm, ninety times over. Useful to a human hunting for one prompt; to a crawler, thin and repetitive. So Google indexed four and shrugged at the rest, and AdSense saw exactly the same thing.
Month two is a different game:
- Breaking the template sameness, so every page has a reason to exist beyond its keyword — more depth, real examples, a distinct angle.
- Going where the people already are instead of waiting on Google — answering questions on Quora and Reddit (genuinely, no spam links), and posting the visual, quick-tip prompts to Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
- Fixing an internal-linking and keyword-cannibalization mess I found in my own audit, where a few pages were quietly competing for the same search.
Honest numbers today: a few dozen visitors a month, $0 revenue, 4 pages indexed, AdSense re-review pending.
The question I keep circling: with one thin-but-broad content site, is it better to gut it down to 20 genuinely great pages, or keep all 110 and slowly upgrade them in place? I can argue both ways. What actually worked for you?
I think you're already asking the right question.
Personally, I'd keep the pages, but I'd resist trying to improve all 110 at once. I'd pick the pages with the most potential and turn those into something genuinely worth bookmarking—real examples, original insights, and content that isn't just another variation of the same template. Once that approach works, I'd apply it to the next batch.
I also like that you were honest about the numbers. So many "launch stories" skip that part. Looking forward to seeing how the site evolves over the next few months.
You called it, and I did keep them. I posted the month-two numbers here two days ago, under the title "Last month I asked whether to gut my site to 20 pages or keep 110. Here's what actually happened," if you want the whole thing.
Short version: Google went from 4 indexed pages to 115 out of 129, and I changed almost nothing on the site.
I did run your suggestion, though, just scoped down to one page. I picked a prompt page and rebuilt it exactly the way you're describing: worked example, real outbound citations, a proper FAQ, nothing templated. Over the next month it earned 8 impressions. The site averages about 8.6 impressions per page. The deep rewrite landed at dead average.
That's one page over one month, so I'm not calling it settled. It's also possible a page sitting at average position 40 can't show quality either way, because nobody scrolls far enough to judge it. But it moved me toward thinking my ceiling is authority, not depth. DR 0, one real backlink, and that backlink is a post like this one.
The part I still haven't solved is the part your comment quietly assumes: picking which pages have the most potential. Impressions were spread thin and evenly across all of them, so I chose on gut feel and chose wrong. If you use an actual signal for that, in GSC or anywhere else, I'd take it.
And thanks for the note on the numbers. Posting them is easy when the graph goes up, which is exactly why I wanted the flat month in there too.
Thanks for coming back with the results. I really appreciate when people share what actually happened.
One thing that stood out to me is that you tested the idea instead of rebuilding the whole site. Even though that page performed about the same, you still learned something useful. Ruling out a hypothesis is progress too.
I'd probably keep doing exactly that - small experiments instead of making huge changes all at once.
What stood out to me is that Google and AdSense may have rejected the same thing for completely different reasons.
A page can be useful enough for a visitor and still fail to justify its existence as a destination.
The decision I'd be most interested in isn't 20 pages versus 110 pages.
It's what evidence should count as proof that a page deserves to exist in the first place.
"What evidence should count as proof a page deserves to exist" — that's a sharper question than the one I'd been asking myself, and it flips the whole thing.
You're right that useful-to-a-visitor and deserves-to-be-a-destination are two different bars. Where I'd push it further: I don't think you can prove the second one from inside the page. I can make a page specific, well-structured, genuinely helpful — and that's still just a claim. The actual proof is external. Does anyone search for it. Does anyone link to it. Do people come back. The page doesn't get to vote on its own existence; the world does.
Which is humbling, because it means my "90 useful pages" is just a guess until something outside the site tests it. So far nothing has — and that's the real signal. Not the index count. The silence around it.
I think we're looking at the same problem from slightly different angles.
Happy to explain what I mean, but it'll be easier over email than in a thread.
What's the best email to reach you on?
Thanks Aryan, this has been the most useful exchange I've had on the post. Easiest to reach me at hello at tamethebot dot com (IH won't let me post it as a proper link yet).
Curious what you're seeing. One thing up front so we don't talk past each other: right now I'm treating the indexing problem as an authority-and-backlinks issue, not a naming one, so I'm not planning to rebrand or move off the domain. If your angle is positioning or messaging, I'm genuinely open. Send the gist over whenever.
Sent over what I was seeing.