Last month I asked whether to gut my site to 20 pages or keep 110. Here's what actually happened

Last month I posted here with a real question. I had a broad, thin content site, about 110 pages, and I couldn't decide whether to gut it to 20 genuinely great pages or keep all of them and upgrade in place. Most of you said prune. I didn't. Here's the month-two data, because it turns out you were right and I was right, about two different things.

I kept the pages. For search, that was the correct call.

Google had indexed 4 of my pages in June. It's now indexed 115 of 129. The pages I nearly deleted are the pages now pulling impressions. If I'd gutted to 20, I'd have 20 indexed pages instead of 115, and no honest way of knowing in advance which 20 would have been the keepers. Keeping them and being patient worked on the indexing side.

Then the part that stung.

AdSense rejected the site for "low value content." Twice. The exact trait the indexer stopped caring about, thin and templated pages, is the exact trait the ad reviewer rejected me for. Indexing recovered. Monetization did not. The thin-pages problem didn't get solved by keeping the pages. It just moved from one gate to the next.

So why am I still not pruning to 20?

Because I ran the experiment instead of guessing. I rebuilt one page to be genuinely deep: worked example, citations, real FAQ, all of it. Over the next month it earned 8 impressions. My site averages about 8.6 per page. The deep version landed at dead average. My pages don't sit on page 4 because they're shallow. They sit on page 4 because my domain has no authority: DR 0, one real backlink, average position around 40. Pruning to 20 great pages doesn't fix a backlink problem. It just leaves me with fewer results buried on page 4.

The thing that genuinely surprised me

My best-performing traffic source right now is this post's predecessor. The June build-in-public post I wrote here is my #2 traffic source overall in GA4, behind only Google organic, at about 20 sessions in 30 days, up 900% (off a small base, but it's real). For contrast: six weeks of posting prompt images to Pinterest produced 1 session. One honest post to a community that cares beat a month and a half of image distribution by roughly 20x.

That reframed my entire month-two plan. I'm not fighting for crawl budget anymore, I have it now. I'm fighting for authority and revenue, and the channel actually paying out is showing up where people already are and being useful, not firing more pages into the void.

The plan

Stop resubmitting AdSense unchanged. A third identical submission earns a third "low value" reply. I'm going to try Ezoic instead, which is far more forgiving of new, low-traffic sites, and let AdSense sit until I have the traffic and links to come back with.

Keep writing in public here, and keep answering questions where my niche actually lives, because that's the measurable winner so far.

Honest numbers so this isn't a highlight reel: about 69 sessions in 30 days, and a real slice of those are datacenter bots rather than humans (the top "cities" in my analytics are literally AWS and Google server-farm towns). Revenue is still 0.

Two questions I'll throw back to you. For a broad-but-thin library like this, has anyone actually turned it into revenue via the Ezoic-then-grow route, or did the people who won prune hard first and I'm about to learn that the expensive way? And separately: has build-in-public ever converted into real revenue for you, or does it top out as a nice traffic-and-moral-support channel that never pays rent?