seo-programmatic

---
name: seo-programmatic
description: >
license: MIT
---

# Programmatic SEO Analysis & Planning

Build and audit SEO pages generated at scale from structured data sources.
Enforces quality gates to prevent thin content penalties and index bloat.

## Data Source Assessment

Evaluate the data powering programmatic pages:
- **CSV/JSON files**: Row count, column uniqueness, missing values
- **API endpoints**: Response structure, data freshness, rate limits
- **Database queries**: Record count, field completeness, update frequency
- Data quality checks:
  - Each record must have enough unique attributes to generate distinct content
  - Flag duplicate or near-duplicate records (>80% field overlap)
  - Verify data freshness; stale data produces stale pages

## Template Engine Planning

Design templates that produce unique, valuable pages:
- **Variable injection points**: Title, H1, body sections, meta description, schema
- **Content blocks**: Static (shared across pages) vs dynamic (unique per page)
- **Conditional logic**: Show/hide sections based on data availability
- **Supplementary content**: Related items, contextual tips, user-generated content
- Template review checklist:
  - Each page must read as a standalone, valuable resource
  - No "mad-libs" patterns (just swapping city/product names in identical text)
  - Dynamic sections must add genuine information, not just keyword variations

## URL Pattern Strategy

### Common Patterns
- `/tools/[tool-name]`: Tool/product directory pages
- `/[city]/[service]`: Location + service pages
- `/integrations/[platform]`: Integration landing pages
- `/glossary/[term]`: Definition/reference pages
- `/templates/[template-name]`: Downloadable template pages

### URL Rules
- Lowercase, hyphenated slugs derived from data
- Logical hierarchy reflecting site architecture
- No duplicate slugs; enforce uniqueness at generation time
- Keep URLs under 100 characters
- No query parameters for primary content URLs
- Consistent trailing slash usage (match existing site pattern)

## Internal Linking Automation

- **Hub/spoke model**: Category hub pages linking to individual programmatic pages
- **Related items**: Auto-link to 3-5 related pages based on data attributes
- **Breadcrumbs**: Generate BreadcrumbList schema from URL hierarchy
- **Cross-linking**: Link between programmatic pages sharing attributes (same category, same city, same feature)
- **Anchor text**: Use descriptive, varied anchor text. Avoid exact-match keyword repetition
- Link density: 3-5 internal links per 1000 words (match seo-content guidelines)

## Thin Content Safeguards

### Quality Gates

| Metric | Threshold | Action |
|--------|-----------|--------|
| Pages without content review | 100+ | ⚠️ WARNING: require content audit before publishing |
| Pages without justification | 500+ | 🛑 HARD STOP: require explicit user approval and thin content audit |
| Unique content per page | <40% | ❌ Flag as thin content (likely penalty risk) |
| Word count per page | <300 | ⚠️ Flag for review (may lack sufficient value) |

### Scaled Content Abuse: Enforcement Context (2025-2026)

Google's Scaled Content Abuse policy (introduced March 2024) saw major enforcement escalation in 2025:

- **June 2025:** Wave of manual actions targeting websites with AI-generated content at scale
- **August 2025:** Third-party/SEO-community reporting described stronger SpamBrain detection for AI-generated link schemes and content farms
- **Result:** Google reported 45% reduction in low-quality, unoriginal content in search results post-March 2024 enforcement

**Enhanced quality gates for programmatic pages:**
- **Content differentiation:** ≥30-40% of content must be genuinely unique between any two programmatic pages (not just city/keyword string replacement)
- **Human review:** Minimum 5-10% sample review of generated pages before publishing
- **Progressive rollout:** Publish in batches of 50-100 pages. Monitor indexing and rankings for 2-4 weeks before expanding. Never publish 500+ programmatic pages simultaneously without explicit quality review.
- **Standalone value test:** Each page should pass: "Would this page be worth publishing even if no other similar pages existed?"
- **Site reputation abuse:** Google clarified site reputation abuse language on 2024-11-19; treat third-party/hosted programmatic content as a policy risk.

> **Recommendation:** The WARNING gate at `<40% unique content` remains appropriate. Consider a HARD STOP at `<30%` unique content to prevent scaled content abuse risk.

### Safe Programmatic Pages (OK at scale)
✅ Integration pages (with real setup docs, API details, screenshots)
✅ Template/tool pages (with downloadable content, usage instructions)
✅ Glossary pages (200+ word definitions with examples, related terms)
✅ Product pages (unique specs, reviews, comparison data)
✅ Data-driven pages (unique statistics, charts, analysis per record)

### Penalty Risk (avoid at scale)
❌ Location pages with only city name swapped in identical text
❌ "Best [tool] for [industry]" without industry-specific value
❌ "[Competitor] alternative" without real comparison data
❌ AI-generated pages without human review and unique value-add
❌ Pages where >60% of content is shared template boilerplate

### Uniqueness Calculation
Unique content % = (words unique to this page) / (total words on page) × 100

Measure against all other pages in the programmatic set. Shared headers, footers, and navigation are excluded from the calculation. Template boilerplate text IS included.

## Canonical Strategy

- Every programmatic page must have a self-referencing canonical tag
- Parameter variations (sort, filter) canonical to the base URL when duplicate or low-value
- Paginated series: use self-canonical paginated pages when content differs; keep crawlable links
- If programmatic pages overlap with manual pages, the manual page is canonical
- No canonical to a different domain unless intentional cross-domain setup

## Sitemap Integration

- Auto-generate sitemap entries for all programmatic pages
- Split at 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed per sitemap file, whichever comes first (protocol limit)
- Use sitemap index if multiple sitemap files needed
- `<lastmod>` reflects actual data update timestamp (not generation time)
- Exclude noindexed programmatic pages from sitemap
- Register sitemap in robots.txt
- Update sitemap dynamically as new records are added to data source

## Index Bloat Prevention

- **Noindex low-value pages**: Pages that don't meet quality gates
- **Pagination**: Reserve noindex/canonical consolidation for true duplicates or low-value filtered views
- **Faceted navigation**: Reserve noindex/canonical to base category for true duplicates or low-value filtered views
- **Crawl budget**: For sites with >10k programmatic pages, monitor crawl stats in Search Console
- **Thin page consolidation**: Merge records with insufficient data into aggregated pages
- **Regular audits**: Monthly review of indexed page count vs intended count

## Output

### Programmatic SEO Score: XX/100

### Assessment Summary
| Category | Status | Score |
|----------|--------|-------|
| Data Quality | ✅/⚠️/❌ | XX/100 |
| Template Uniqueness | ✅/⚠️/❌ | XX/100 |
| URL Structure | ✅/⚠️/❌ | XX/100 |
| Internal Linking | ✅/⚠️/❌ | XX/100 |
| Thin Content Risk | ✅/⚠️/❌ | XX/100 |
| Index Management | ✅/⚠️/❌ | XX/100 |

### Critical Issues (fix immediately)
### High Priority (fix within 1 week)
### Medium Priority (fix within 1 month)
### Low Priority (backlog)

### Recommendations
- Data source improvements
- Template modifications
- URL pattern adjustments
- Quality gate compliance actions

## Error Handling

| Scenario | Action |
|----------|--------|
| URL unreachable | Report connection error with status code. Suggest verifying URL accessibility and checking for authentication requirements. |
| No programmatic pages detected | Inform user that no template-generated or data-driven page patterns were found. Suggest checking if pages use client-side rendering or if the URL points to the correct section. |
| Thin content threshold exceeded | Trigger quality gate warning. Report the unique content percentage and flag pages below 40% uniqueness. Require user acknowledgment before proceeding. |
| Quality gate violation | Halt analysis at the HARD STOP threshold (500+ pages without justification or <30% unique content). Present findings and require explicit user approval to continue. |