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
- State the problem in one sentence, in the words your users would use.
- Pick a signal you can measure weekly, not just at launch.
- 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.