Programmatic SEO is the mass generation of pages from a template populated with data – typically combinations of product and city, brand and model, or comparisons of two items. It works when there is a real data source behind it that gives each page unique content: parameters, prices, availability, statistics, ratings. In that case the page is useful to the user and covers queries you would never process by hand. Failure always comes from the same cause – a template without data, where only one word changes, producing thousands of nearly identical pages that fill up the index and worsen the ranking of the whole website. Before launching, test the approach on a small sample, monitor how many pages actually get indexed, and have a rule ready for which combinations not to generate.
See also: Local landing pages, Index bloat, Faceted navigation.
