[HN Gopher] Experimenting with Programmatic SEO
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       Experimenting with Programmatic SEO
        
       Author : asebold
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2021-11-11 16:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (allisonseboldt.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (allisonseboldt.com)
        
       | st3ve445678 wrote:
       | Great... a ton of automatically generated nonsense content that
       | is "human readable" so you can sell stuff. Just what the internet
       | needs, more low quality, bullshit content. And the author seems
       | so proud of this.
        
         | Veen wrote:
         | I tend to agree, but there are circumstances where templated
         | content is useful. Businesses with lots of regional locations
         | or which sell thousands of similar products or components, for
         | example.
         | 
         | In those circumstances, you can hire a cheap writer to churn
         | out hundreds of crappy pages based on product data sheets or
         | you can hire a developer to make a template system that does
         | more or less the same thing.
        
           | asebold wrote:
           | Yes, this is a good point. It's not like written articles
           | always ensure higher quality.
        
         | asebold wrote:
         | This experiment isn't about creating "Nonsense content". I
         | agree the internet definitely doesn't need more misinformation
         | or fluff. And that isn't my goal with this experiment.
         | 
         | I don't think content is automatically low quality with
         | automated SEO. And if it is, it won't work because users won't
         | find it helpful. The goal, like all good content, is to help
         | people. But I understand if you're skeptical.
        
       | vgeek wrote:
       | This is common in certain verticals, think e-commerce
       | organizations with relatively niche products like replacement
       | auto parts. They (the big fish being Autozone and Advance) go
       | through the effort of having separate pages for each model year
       | and the part name-- even when parts are interchangeable across
       | multiple years. There are tools sold on a commission basis like
       | http://www.youramigo.com that automatically create these pages,
       | but they never seemed to get much traction.
       | 
       | The largest issue is Google's crawl budget. With limited domain
       | authority, it will be hard to get xx,xxx+ pages indexed without a
       | meaningful number of quality backlinks. Low MSV queries are even
       | tougher if you don't rank #1, too, so using GSC to A/b test
       | titles/descriptions CTRs will be super helpful. On-site
       | interlinking will also be another easy way to juice visibility.
        
         | 422long wrote:
         | This is exactly what I see. Run and e-commerce site with 175k
         | different product pages. Each have a ton of differentiation and
         | keywords. Huge investments is page metadata and sitemap haven't
         | resulted in Google ever indexing more than half the pages.
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-11 23:03 UTC)