Programmatic SEO — content quality

Programmatic pages succeed or fail on whether each page deserves to exist on its own. Google's Helpful Content System actively penalizes thin, near-duplicate, doorway pages — and the penalty often hits the whole domain, not just the bad URLs.

Companion: programmatic-seo-pages, seo-meta-tags-spa, seo-structured-data.

The single rule

If a user landed on this URL and 9 nearly identical ones, would they find each useful?

If not, do not publish that row.

Per-page minimum bar

A programmatic page should have:

• ≥ 300 words of substantive, page-unique content.
• At least 3 unique data points (price, stat, testimonial, list item) that vary per row.
• At least 1 UGC or hand-curated element (review, FAQ answered by a human, local note).
• A reason a user would click your result over the existing top 3.

If you can't hit this for a row, leave it unpublished.

Data inputs — where uniqueness comes from

Mix at least three. A page built only from AI prose will read like every other AI page.

AI generation guardrails

If you use an LLM to draft prose:

1. Feed it structured per-row facts in the prompt — never let it invent facts.
2. Force a specific structure (intro, comparison table, 3 bullet pros/cons, 1 anecdote).
3. Human review before published = true. Even a 30-second skim catches hallucinations.
4. Disclose AI if your audience or regulation requires it.
5. Re-generate on a schedule with refreshed data — don't ship 2024 prices in 2026.

Deduplication

Run a similarity check across pages before launch:

-- find suspiciously similar pages
select a.slug, b.slug, similarity(a.body, b.body) as sim
from public.location_pages a
cross join public.location_pages b
where a.slug < b.slug and similarity(a.body, b.body) > 0.80
order by sim desc;

(Use pg_trgm's similarity(); or compute embeddings + cosine if you need semantic dedup.)

Threshold: kill or merge any pair with > 0.85 prose similarity.

E-E-A-T signals

Show Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness:

• Author byline with photo, role, link to bio.
• datePublished + dateModified visible and accurate (see seo-structured-data).
• Citations for facts: link to the source.
• Reviews / testimonials with names, dates, optional verification.
• Contact / legal pages linked from footer (not orphaned).

Quality gates before publishing

Block published = true until each row passes:

• ≥ 300 words page-unique text
• No near-duplicate (similarity < 0.80) of another page
• Title and meta unique
• Hero image exists (real or generated for this row)
• At least one human-reviewed paragraph
• No invented facts (LLM output reviewed)

Enforce with a server check, not "the team will remember".

Pruning

After 90 days in production:

• Identify pages with zero clicks + zero impressions (Search Console).
• Set noindex = true and remove from sitemap.
• After 180 days with no recovery, set published = false and 301 redirect to the parent hub.

This is the most important habit in programmatic SEO: cut what doesn't work.

Avoid

• Shipping 5,000 rows on launch day. Start with 100 best; expand by 100/week.
• Identical headline structure ("Best X in Y") with nothing else unique.
• Auto-translated content without native review.
• Stuffing locations into a single page (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, …) hoping one ranks.
• Using AI to invent reviews or testimonials (illegal in many jurisdictions; always against Google guidelines).

Checklist

• Quality gate enforced at the published flag.
• Deduplication script run before each batch publish.
• Human review per row, recorded with reviewer + timestamp.
• Monthly pruning of zero-traffic pages.
• Author / source / date signals visible on every page.