Google’s John Mueller went off again on programmatic SEO, this time saying that programmatic SEO can “often leads to a site that’s either spam, borderline spam, or low quality,” he wrote. These tactics can often lead Google’s “systems have possibly lost faith in your site providing good value to users based on the old pages,” he added.
He posted this on Bluesky adding, “It’s easy to spin something up with many pages, it’s hard to provide real value to users.”
And he then noted that if your site is not performing well over programmatic SEO, he said, “Resolving this tends to take time & significant effort to show the value.” Basically, John said that once Google loses faith in the value of your content on your site, it can take many months and a lot of effort to gain that trust back and start to rank again.
Regarding the site you describe, it’s hard to say, but I worry a bit because it sounds like a programmatic SEO play, where you iterate through a large list of domain names, technologies, and attributes – finding all possible combinations.
It’s easy for a programmer to do, even easier with code generators now. You end up with tons of pages that have “some” value, but the overall picture is not that exciting. Expanding it with even more generated data (“what does php mean?” etc) doesn’t make it more useful for users.
Programmatic SEO like this often leads to a site that’s either spam, borderline spam, or low quality. It’s easy to spin something up with many pages, it’s hard to provide real value to users. Our systems have possibly lost faith in your site providing good value to users based on the old pages.
Resolving this tends to take time & significant effort to show the value. For sake of a comparison & timing, you could look at how others in SEO work on resolving issues around spam and core updates (not to say that your site is spam, but to get a sense of the work & time involved).
(I’m sure some others will comment here with their thoughts & links to articles they wrote on these topics – take a look, review them with a grain of salt, and see what makes sense for your specific case.)
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
