/seo-programmatic

name: seo-programmatic
description: Programmatic SEO planning and safeguards for pages generated at scale — template design, URL patterns, internal-link automation, thin-content thresholds, and index-bloat prevention. Trigger when the user says "programmatic SEO", "pSEO", "pages at scale", "dynamic pages", "template pages", "generated pages", "data-driven SEO", or "scaled pages".

seo-programmatic

**Family:** seo **Status:** Stable

Purpose

Plan SEO at template scale (city + service combos, product + use-case matrices) with the safeguards that decide whether pSEO succeeds. Most pSEO fails not from technical issues but from Google de-prioritizing thin, near-duplicate generated pages — the thin-content safeguard is the differentiator.

Triggers

• "programmatic seo" / "pSEO" / "data-driven seo"
• "pages at scale" / "scaled pages"
• "dynamic pages" / "template pages" / "generated pages"

Inputs

• The template definition (variables + content sources)
• Expected page count and a few sample input rows
• Existing site context

Steps

1. **Design the template** so each page carries genuinely unique value, not just a swapped noun — unique data, local specifics, real media per page. 2. **Simulate output** across the sample inputs and estimate the unique-content ratio; use `seo-content` to score representative pages for thinness. 3. **Set thin-content safeguards** — a minimum unique-content threshold; pages below it get `noindex` (or aren't generated). State the threshold explicitly. 4. **URL + canonical strategy** — slug conventions, parameter handling, and canonicalization so variants don't cannibalize. 5. **Internal-link automation** — rules for how generated pages interlink (to a hub, to siblings) with sensible anchor text; align to clusters via `seo-cluster`. 6. **Index-bloat plan** — decide which template pages Google should crawl vs. `noindex`; submit the worthy set via `seo-sitemap`. 7. **Render** the plan: template spec, thresholds, link rules, index strategy.

Outputs

• Programmatic SEO plan with explicit unique-content thresholds
• Internal-link automation spec + URL/canonical strategy
• Index-management (crawl vs noindex) plan

Dependencies

• `seo-content` (unique-content scoring), `seo-cluster` (keyword-template fit),

`seo-sitemap` (index the worthy set)

Notes

The thin-content threshold is the safeguard that keeps a pSEO project from getting the whole template pattern devalued. Decide it before generating, not after.