2026-01-09 · SEO

Case study: 40,000 programmatic SEO pages, six months later

What worked, what got deindexed, and the templates worth keeping.

Introduction

A candid look at generating landing pages from a dataset: keyword coverage, thin-content risk, and crawl budget lessons.

What usually goes wrong

Teams that skip this step tend to share three failure modes:

  • Optimizing a number nobody agreed to move.
  • Copying a setup from a project with different constraints.
  • Deferring the decision until it is expensive to reverse.

How to approach it

  1. State the problem in one sentence, in the words your users would use.
  2. Pick a signal you can measure weekly, not just at launch.
  3. Timebox a small trial; a two-day spike beats a two-week debate.

Wrap-up

If SEO taught us anything, it is that boring consistency beats clever one-offs. Bring the lessons back to your team before they fossilize into folklore.