I have a couple niche sites that I plan to rank for local terms ie: "pizza seattle" My goal is to rank for the top 20 cities in the US for each niche (not pizza btw). My original plan was to upload the top 10 cities for each state now, maybe 10 a day, then build links for only the top 20 landing pages. Today, I realized, since my primary goal is to rank for the top 20 cities, it would be better off for me to only upload the pages for the top 20 cities first, build links, once they are ranked where I want them to be ranked, I slowly upload the other pages My reasoning being: more pages you have, less link juice each individual page will receive, so if you cut down on the pages on the site (maybe stick an no-index on the less pertinent pages), more juice will go toward your main keyword pages. Although, I structured my site so that more internal links will go towards the top 20 pages, so maybe I should just upload the other cities now? Thoughts?
I don't agree with your logic about less pages being better. If your internal linking structure is good, more pages is almost always better. Each page on a website is a set of internal links to your other pages. If it were me, I would go ahead and gradually add the top 10 cities for each state, but only link to the top 20 cities overall from your homepage. Link to the other city pages from state pages. You could also link to those top 20 cities from every page on your website if you wanted to. This way your homepage 'link juice' still evenly goes to your important pages. It would only be the state page link juice that gets passed on to those less important city pages. With this strategy you will gradually get rankings for all cities. If your domain gets enough quality links, some of the smaller city pages would get rankings on their own just based on your domain authority.