A company founder shared their experience with programmatic SEO, which they credited for initial success until it was deindexed by Google, calling it a big mistake they won’t repeat. The post, shared on LinkedIn, received scores of supportive comments.
The website didn’t receive a manual action, Google deindexed the web pages due to poor content quality.
Programmatic SEO (pSEO)
Programmatic SEO (aka pSEO) is a phrase that encompasses a wide range of tactics that have automation at the heart of it. Some of it can be very useful, like automating sitewide meta descriptions, titles, and alt text for images.
pSEO is also the practice of using AI automation to scale content creation sitewide, which is what the person did. They created fifty thousand pages targeting long tail phrases, phrases that are not commonly queried. The site initially received hundreds of clicks and millions of impressions but the success was not long-lived.
According to the post by Miquel Palet (LinkedIn Profile):
“Google flagged our domain. Pages started getting deindexed. Traffic plummeted overnight.
We learned the hard way that shortcuts don’t scale sustainably.
It was a huge mistake, but also a great lesson.
And it’s one of the reasons we rebranded to Tailride.”
Thin AI Content Was The Culprit
A follow-up post explained that they believe the AI generated content backfired was because it was thin content, which makes sense. Thin content, regardless of how it was authored, can be problematic.
One of the posts by Palet explained:
“We’re not sure, but probably not because AI. It was thin content and probably duplicated.”
Rasmus Sørensen (LinkedIn profile), an experienced digital marketer shared his opinion that he’s seen some marketers pushing shady practices under the banner of pSEO:
“Thanks for sharing and putting some real live experiences forward. Programmatic SEO had been touted as the next best thing in SEO. It’s not and I’ve seen soo much garbage published the last few months and agencies claiming that their pSEO is the silver bullet.
It very rarely is.”
Joe Youngblood (LinkedIn profile) shared that SEO trends can be abused and implied that it is a viable strategy if done correctly:
“I would always do something like pSEO under the supervision of a seasoned SEO consultant. This tale happens all too frequently with an SEO trend…”
What They Did To Fix The site
The company founder shared that they rebranded the website to a new domain, redirecting the old domain to the new one, and focused their site on higher quality content that’s relevant to users.
They explained:
“Less pages + more quality”
A site: search for their domain shows that Google is now indexing their content, indicating that they are back on track.
Takeaways
Programmatic SEO can be useful if approached with an understanding of where the line is between good quality and “not-quality” content.
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