Read this before the draft. The brief asked me to "build excitement about the
content momentum". I have not done that, because the facts do not support it.
We delivered 7 posts, one a day, zero errors. The customer has deleted 4 of them. On the
same four dates they published their own replacements with more generic titles. That is our
highest-fidelity quality signal and it is pointing down. An upbeat momentum email would read as
though we had not looked at their site.
| Date | Our post | On site now |
|---|
| 03 Aug | Traditional Panamanian Food: Dishes Your Abuela Would Cook | live (471) |
| 04 Aug | Panamanian Street Food: A Sensory Walk Through Fritura Carts | live (492) |
| 05 Aug | Authentic Panama Food vs Tourist Trap: 7 Signs | deleted (564) |
| 06 Aug | What to Eat in Casco Viejo: A Dish-by-Dish Walking Guide | deleted (656) |
| 07 Aug | Concolón: Panamanian Street Food in Panama City | deleted (804) |
| 08 Aug | Panamanian vs Colombian Empanadas: What's Different? | deleted (993) |
| 09 Aug | The History of Concolón in Panama | live (1212) |
I nearly got this wrong. All four deleted URLs return HTTP 200, so a naive
check would call them live. They serve the homepage, and the slugs do not exist in the REST
API. It is a soft 404. Worth knowing: any delivery check we build that trusts a 200 would report
these as delivered.
Hi,
Your trial ends on Monday, so here is where things stand.
ClearPost published seven posts on concolon-restaurant.com since 3 August, one a day. Three are on the site now:
- Traditional Panamanian Food Your Abuela Would Cook
- A Walking Tour of Panamanian Street Food in Panama City
- History of Concolón in Panama: From Caldero to Table
The other four are gone, and that is the part I actually want to ask you about. I would rather know why than guess. Was it the topics, the writing, the length, or something else entirely? One line is enough, and it changes what gets written next.
I ask now because the queue is already set: where to eat authentic Panamanian food in Panama City, a traditional Panamanian breakfast guide, and how to make concolón at home. If those are wrong for you, tell me and I will change them before they publish.
One separate thing I noticed. When a post is deleted on your site, its old address loads your homepage instead of showing a proper "not found" page. Google reads that as a broken signal and it can hold back the rest of the site. Whoever manages your hosting can fix it quickly.
Nothing happens automatically on Monday. If you do nothing the trial simply ends.
Christian
Choices I made
- Said "three are on the site now", not "we published seven". He deleted four. He knows he deleted them. Claiming seven live would tell him we do not look at his site.
- Made the deletion the ask, not a complaint. "I would rather know why than guess" invites an answer without defending the work. This is the single most valuable thing we could learn from this trial, and there are two days left to learn it.
- Named the next three topics. It makes "tell me and I will change them" a real offer rather than a gesture, and it gives him something concrete to react to.
- Gave him one useful thing for free: the soft 404. It is true, it is specific, it costs him nothing to hear, and it is the kind of thing an agency would charge to notice. It also demonstrates we read his site rather than his dashboard.
- No upgrade pitch. "Nothing happens automatically on Monday" removes the pressure. With 4 of 7 deleted, a push to convert would be the wrong read of the room and would probably cost the reply.
- English. The site is English throughout (tourist-facing, though the restaurant is in Panama City), and the day 2 email was English. One older post on the site is Spanish; the rest are not.
- No em dashes. About 250 words.
Verified today, not assumed
- 7 calendar rows carry a
wp_post_id; 0 generation errors across all 37 rows.
- The 3 surviving posts are substantial: 2,387 / 2,665 / 3,312 words, each with a featured image and 3 inline images.
- The 4 deleted ids return
rest_post_invalid_id, and their slugs return no post.
- Replacements exist on the same dates (1195, 1184, 1187, 1191) with more generic titles, and they are not from our calendar.
- His day 2 question ("how do I change my home page?") was answered, 06 Aug 20:23Z. Not an open ticket.
- Trial expires 2026-08-10T22:55Z. Plugin still active.
What I would watch after this
His replacements are shorter and more generic than what we wrote ("Discover the Magic of
Panamanian Comfort Food" versus "Panamanian vs Colombian Empanadas: What's Different?"). If his
answer is that ours were too long or too niche, that is a content-strategy signal worth more than
this one account, because our whole differentiation is picking specific winnable topics.