seo-programmatic

Programmatic SEO

Purpose

Assess or plan scalable page systems without creating index bloat, misleading content, or unmaintainable templates. The unit of review is the page system: input data, template logic, user task, content differentiation, URL/canonical rules, quality controls, and rollout behavior.

Read references/scaled-page-protocol.md before approving a template or rollout. Read editorial-vs-indexability.md before deriving publication or search status from record fields. Read corpus-propagation-contract.md before changing a canonical, redirect, sitemap, discovery, locale, or whole-corpus rule.

Input gate

Require the page-system purpose, target reader/task, data dictionary and provenance, source update cadence, template/rendered examples, locale/market rules, canonical/indexability policy, internal linking logic, quality owner, and proposed rollout. Do not infer product facts, locations, prices, availability, comparisons, or user demand from keyword lists alone.

Workflow

1. Model the user value and product decision. Explain what distinct decision/task each page can satisfy, what evidence or data makes it different from nearby variants, and the explicit product-owner end state for the bounded corpus.
2. Inspect inputs and template. Verify data ownership, freshness, null/error handling, sourced claims, locale logic, entity identity, URLs, canonical behavior, structured data eligibility, and rendering.
3. Sample for failure modes. Review representative normal, sparse-data, conflicting-data, locale, outlier, and deprecation cases. Look for thin duplication, made-up combinations, contradictory claims, inaccessible values, or non-functional internal paths.
4. Separate the two axes. Record editorial readiness independently from search status/indexability. Never derive noindex from an editorial flag alone. A unique canonical-owner page follows the explicit indexing policy; an owner-linked duplicate source follows the approved redirect/canonical map. noindex requires explicit product policy or concrete risk evidence.
5. Propagate the contract. Apply the decision consistently across detail pages, search/browse results, hubs, discovery links, sitemap, hreflang, and an optional maintained llms.txt, plus feeds/schema/notifications when used. Verify a shared resolver or corpus rule over its full affected route class or a justified closed population.
6. Define publication gates. State required fields, minimum useful differentiation, source freshness policy, human/editorial exceptions, explicit index/noindex/redirect/withhold conditions, QA population, monitoring, and removal/rollback behavior. Do not use word counts or static “unique-content percentages” as the gate.
7. Stage or apply the approved corpus decision. Prefer an owned reversible cohort when the end state is undecided. When the product owner explicitly approves a whole-corpus end state, do not shrink it to a sample; retain canonical, duplicate, safety, legal, privacy, and access constraints. Route production implementation through seo-action-plan.