Seventeen articles on the same subject, and not one of them stood out

I counted my own blog before sitting down to write this. Eighty-three texts in Greek, each with its English version. Seventeen of them in the SEO & GEO category. Twenty-two in Web Development.

Fine numbers, the kind you quote at a dinner table. And completely useless, unless the next question follows: which of the seventeen is the main article on the subject?

On that day there was no answer, because I had never decided which one was the main one. And for as long as I had not, those seventeen articles were not building authority together. They were competing with each other over the same question.

Why am I telling you? Because if you pay someone to write articles for you every month, this concerns you more than it concerns me. I wrote mine myself and paid for it in time. You pay for it in money: every article that answers a question already answered is an article you paid for and that works against you.

In this article you will see how I spotted it, how you check it yourself in an hour with no technical knowledge, and what to ask of whoever writes for you. At the end you will find the result on my own site, so you can see it with your own eyes.

Let me use my own example, because that is where it hurts

On 15 April I published «SEO or GEO? The truth is that you need both». On 6 June I published «GEO vs SEO: How to become visible in answer engines». Those were their titles at the time. What became of them, you will see at the end.

Read those two titles again. Am I wrong?

Two articles, two addresses, one question. I did not write them carelessly. I wrote them two months apart, in a different mood each time, and while writing the second I did not think about the first for a moment. That is how it always happens. Nobody sits down to write, on purpose, an article they already have. Time simply passes.

The result was that anyone who asked an answer engine (AI) «what is the difference between SEO and GEO» and reached me would reach one of the two at random. And the engine, trying to work out which of my pages was the main one on this subject, saw two candidates. So it split the weight between the two, instead of giving all of it to one.

What you should see in a blog that is building something

A blog that works properly is not a pile of articles. For every subject that matters to you commercially, there is one central page that covers it as a whole, from beginning to end, in language someone with no background can follow. That is called a pillar page. The individual articles hang underneath it, each with its own narrow question, and each has a link that points back up to it.

You do not need to know how it is built. You need to know whether it exists. If you have five or more articles on the same subject and cannot find that pillar page anywhere, then your articles are not building anything together. They are just piling up.

And do not confuse a pillar page with the category page every blog has. A category is a filter that produces a list automatically. It says nothing on its own and nobody reads it. If you are told «we have categories», you have not been answered.

The one-hour check you do yourself

You are not reading articles. You are only looking at the titles and their short descriptions.

Write on a sheet of paper, or in a spreadsheet if that suits you, the titles of every article that has been written for you on one subject, with their descriptions beside them. Then, for each pair that looks suspicious, answer in one sentence: who is the first one for, and who is the second one for. If the answer comes out clean, the two articles are doing different jobs and all is well. If you start saying «yes, but that one takes it from a slightly different angle», they are not doing different jobs. They are competing, and you paid for one of them for no reason.

The second check takes no effort, only patience. Search for the subject together with your site’s name and see which of the two shows up. Do it again once a week for a month. If the result changes from week to week, it means the engine has not decided which one to show either. And it is unlikely to, since it was handed two pages for the same question.

And if at this point you thought «fine, but I have neither a spreadsheet nor a list of my own articles», you are not the exception. The list already exists inside your own site, on your blog page, and it copies across in ten minutes.

What to ask of whoever writes for you

If the check finds pairs, the fixing is not your job. It belongs to whoever writes for you. What concerns you is knowing what to ask, so that you are not answered with generalities.

Ask, first, for each pair: which of the two is the main one, and what happens to the other. There are three right answers: they are merged into one, their subjects are separated so the difference shows in the title, or, if you have five or more articles on the subject, one becomes the pillar page. Any of the three is an answer. «We will look into it» is not.

Ask, second, that no article be deleted without a reason. An article that has been live for a while has collected visits and links from other sites. Deleting it throws all of that away, and it is the last resort, not the first.

And ask, third, before the next article is written, which question it answers that none of the previous ones has already answered. That one question, if you ask it every month, stops the problem before you pay for it.

And what did I actually do with mine?

Fair question, and it would be cheek to write all of the above without applying it.

The two I mentioned at the start were not merged. They were separated, and you can go and look: one now answers what the difference between SEO and GEO actually is, the other answers what you actually do to get recommended. The difference shows in the title, before anyone opens either.

Above the seventeen there is now a pillar page, the guide to answer engines (AI), and each of the seventeen has a link at its end that points back up to it. The same was done in Web Development, which had twenty-two articles and exactly the same problem: it now has its own guide to your website.

If you want to see what the thing you are paying for should look like, open one of the two guides. That is the benchmark: one page that covers the subject and leads you, not twenty articles waiting for you to find them on your own.

Because the problem is never that a lot of articles were written. It is that they were left to talk all at once, with nobody deciding which one says what. And that, if you are paying, is something you are entitled to check.

If you are paying for articles and cannot tell whether they all talk about the same thing at once, we check it for you. We go through the content on the site, find which articles compete with each other and which lead nowhere, and give you a list of what gets merged, what gets separated and which article should lead to which service, in order of priority. Send us your blog’s address through the contact form. We can also take this structure on as a whole, as part of our SEO & GEO service.