What is programmatic SEO?
Programmatic SEO is generating many pages from a dataset and a template, one per entity, to capture long-tail queries that share a shape.
It works when the data carries the page. Semrush runs roughly 304,000 per-domain pages against about 2,100 editorial ones, and each carries genuinely different metrics. It fails when the template carries the page and the data is a variable substituted into it.
The discipline that separates the two is a publishing gate rather than a writing style: only generate a page where the underlying data says something distinct. If most entities in your dataset produce the same answer, most of your pages are duplicates by construction, and the majority of the set is the thin half.
Related
- Thin contentThin content is a page that exists to be indexed rather than to be read. Google's test is purpose and added value, not word count.
- IndexationIndexation is whether a search engine has stored your page and is willing to return it. Being crawled is not the same as being indexed, and being indexed is not the same as ranking.
- Crawl budgetCrawl budget is how much crawling a search engine is willing to spend on your site. On a new or low-authority domain it is small, which is why publishing more pages can reduce how many get indexed.
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