Category Archive SEO

Programmatic content is content created (drumroll, please) programmatically — either by replacing certain pieces of that content according to rulesets, or through the use of generative AI. 

We’re going to set aside the AI stuff for now — frankly, we’re tired of writing about it — and just focus on this Reddit thread, where a user lost a bunch of impressions after de-indexing programmatic content. They did that due to advice from…AI. 

Sigh.

But that thread led to an interesting back-and-forth on LinkedIn: Should programmatic content be de-indexed? 

The short answer is yes, if that content holds no unique value for human readers. We’ll explain our reasoning in a moment, but first, here’s a brief explanation of some of the terms (just in case you’re not an SEO). 

But first, if you’re tackling this problem on your own, we’ve got a deal for you: Send us a message, provide as much detail as possible, and we’ll tell you whether you should de-index a certain set of pages. We’ll do this for free over email, and we won’t make a sales pitch. Easy, right?

Now, onto the boring stuff.

What is de-indexing, and how is it good for SEO?

De-indexing simple means adding a noindex tag to your content, which tells search engines not to rank that page in their results. 

noindex is not a perfect tool, and Google frequently ignores it; if you really need to remove something from Google results, you’ll need to take a more dramatic approach and set an htaccess rule that blocks search engine robots (or if you’re less tech-savvy, you can just password-lock the offending content). 

You don’t want to de-index content unless it’s absolutely necessary. Google and the other search engines are pretty good about deciding what should rank, so as a rule of thumb, you should let the search engines decide which pages make the rankings. That’s why Google will sometimes ignore the noindex tag.

But there are legitimate reasons to use de-index. If you’ve got an eCommerce store, you might have products with URLs that change frequently as variables change, and you’ll want to noindex everything other than the primary version of each page.

That shows Google that you understand that many of your pages are programmatic, and that you’ve designed your site to work that way — you’re not trying to game the system by bloating your page index (the total number of pages on your site). 

When does programmatic content hurt SEO?

Here’s the bad news: If you’re using programmatic content for SEO, it will eventually hurt your SEO.

We’ve seen plenty of websites with large amounts of content that has been programmatically adjusted to include different keywords. For example, an auto dealership in St. Louis might have pages that are titled: 

• Auto Dealership in St. Louis
• Auto Dealership in Maplewood
• Auto Dealership in St. Clair County

If all of those pages are identical other than the locations — and the dealership doesn’t have unique facilities in each of those areas — that’s a blatant attempt to bloat the site’s page index, and it won’t work in the long term.

So when should I deindex programmatic content?

If you’ve got an eCommerce site, your platform (such as Magento or WooCommerce) will probably handle all of the necessary deindexing right out of the box. You can check this by auditing your site (or have us do it, we’re not expensive). 

But if you’ve created a large set of programmatic content, ask yourself:

Does this provide actual value for users? Would a human being want to find this particular page?

If so, keep it. If not, you’ll probably want to delete it entirely — not just de-index it. 

Before you do that, we’d recommend checking the pages in question in Search Console and Analytics to determine whether they’re receiving traffic. Even if you’ve got low-quality pages, you might have tricked Google into sending you traffic (temporarily), and there are ways to retain that traffic. Namely, you’ll add high-quality content to the page, or you’ll make it the primary (canonical) version of its pageset. 

If you’ve got a question about SEO, we’re here to help. Shoot us a message.

We used to think of case studies as sales copy. They showed off your competitive differences. They gave qualified leads confidence that you were the right partner. This was brand storytelling, best for tugging the heartstrings (or purse strings) of sales prospects who were almost ready to click “buy.” 

In other words, we classified case studies as bottom-of-funnel content. For the top of the sales funnel — the discovery phase of a buyer’s journey — we’d recommend helpful, informative blog posts. We’d try to find out what questions your audience hand, then post the best answers to those questions. 

Generative AI has completely flipped our view of case studies (or success stories, if you prefer). They’re not just for sales anymore. They’re also essential top-of-funnel tools, ideal for getting brand mentions into AI overviews and website links into AI citations. Here’s why case studies are more important than ever in the era of zero-click search. 

Case Studies in the Shift From SEO to GEO 

In retrospect, traditional SEO was simple. Every search query was a question. Post the best answer to that question and you’d climb the SERP rankings. There was an alignment of interests between searchers, search engines, and content producers: Everyone wanted the best answers to show up first. 

Now search engines want their own answer to show up first. Searchers seem okay with the shift. It’s hard to know which numbers to trust, but everyone seems to agree that some huge majority — between 60 and 80 percent — of searches are ending without a click. 

In some ways, that’s not as huge a shift as it sounds. As we’ve mentioned before, people who want to buy something still have to go to your website. Search engine rankings are still important for your bottom line. 

But the new paradigm does change the type of content that puts your brand in front of fresh eyes. Before generative AI engines, concise, informative content was great for digital visibility. Now you can’t just answer a question, because AI will do that for you — and the AI overview always comes first. 

To get discovered, you must show up in AI overviews and AI chatbot responses. That’s the goal of generative engine optimization (GEO). Case studies have become really good for GEO for three main reasons: 

1. Case studies give chatbots easy access to examples. 

Generative AI can’t make anything up, but it’s programmed to project authority. It uses real-world examples to do so. If you can provide such an example, you have a strong chance of showing up in the AI-generated answer to a question that’s highly relevant to your industry. 

2. Case studies demonstrate experience. 

As half-baked chatbots take over the internet, real experience is only growing in value. The people who make the chatbots know that, so it’s no surprise that, in 2024, Google added “Experience” to its Search Quality Rater Guidelines. (This joins the pre-existing factors of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). 

With a full slate of success stories on your website, you show off your experience to prospective customers, search engines, and AI bots alike. You’re more likely to be cited in an AI overview. You may also rank higher on traditional search engine results pages (SERPs).

3. Case studies put you in front of highly qualified leads. 

The nice thing about AI search is that it encourages people to ask really, really specific questions. (Now, AI will answer those questions whether it has good information or not, so this benefit doubles as a drawback.) 

But suppose you run a B2B business in a narrow niche, like selling rubber seals to gas mask manufacturers or something. If someone asks ChatGPT, “How do I repair a horse gas mask,” that is a qualified lead. It’s someone you want to get in front of. 

Now say there’s not much info online about rubber gas mask seals in general, let alone specifically for horse gas masks. And say you did a custom horse-gas-mask seal job a few years ago. If you tell that story on your website, chances are high that the AI bots will mention you to that searcher. 

In other words, the case study will help you get discovered. It will also, simultaneously, help you convert a prospect into a customer. In fact, scratch what we said earlier: Case studies haven’t shifted from bottom-of-funnel to top. They’ve grown to occupy the entire sales funnel at once.

We Will Write Case Studies For You (Without AI) 

We’ll talk about what makes a good case study some other time. But if you’d like help telling your success stories, contact us today. We’re experts in the form (and we’re probably cheaper than you think).  

Recently, the Relay office spent an afternoon debating whether or not turkeys eat cigarette butts off the side of the road.

Don’t worry, it’s not as dumb as it sounds—it’s far dumber. Here’s the deal: Near St. Louis, you’ll often see wild turkeys walking along the side of the highway.

Around Thanksgiving, one of our partners suggested that the turkeys were looking for cigarette butts. He’d heard that turkeys get addicted to nicotine, so they frequent highways to feed their addiction.

I’d heard something similar from a friend of mine, but it didn’t seem too likely. We did a quick Google search to settle the issue, but we ran into a problem: Typing any combination of “turkey,” “nicotine,” “cigarette butts,” or “addiction” brought up hundreds of websites about quitting smoking cold turkey. 

That’s useful info, but it wasn’t what we were looking for. We tried searching for scientific papers about birds and nicotine addiction, but didn’t find anything about turkeys specifically. Frustrated, we contacted the National Wild Turkey Foundation and received a quick response from biologist John Burk.

Credit: Alexas_Fotos / Pixabay

“I have been working as a Wildlife Biologist focused on wild turkeys for 30 years in 5 different states, and I can honestly say that I have never heard of this being a problem,” he wrote. “Turkeys have no sense of smell and therefore also no sense of taste.”

Burk went on to explain that turkeys have gizzards, and they walk on the side of the road to find small pieces of gravel that can help them digest their food. If a bird ate a cigarette butt by mistake, it would spit it out, since the experience wouldn’t be pleasant.

That would seem to settle the issue, but by this point, office alliances had formed, and the “turkeys are addicts” crowd wasn’t going to go down without a fight. For a second opinion, we reached out to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, which put us in touch with another biologist.

After laughing at us for several minutes, he agreed with his contemporary.

“People have been dissecting turkeys for over 30 years,” he said. “We’ve never seen a cigarette butt. While I cannot say with certainty that a turkey has never eaten a cigarette, there certainly isn’t a significant population of nicotine-addicted turkeys out there.”

There you have it: Turkeys don’t eat cigarette butts, or if they do, they don’t do it on purpose.

What Turkeys Can Teach Us About SEO And Messaging

After trying in vain to get one of our clients to run a blog about turkeys and nicotine addiction, I realized that there is a tangible SEO lesson here: Google’s semantic search isn’t there yet.

Semantic search attempts to match a searcher’s intent with the results; if you search for “dog training tips” all afternoon and suddenly search for “pet food,” for instance, the search engine will likely present dog food as one of the top results (rather than, say, cat food, or turkey food).

For the most part, it works well, and semantic search is a crucial part of our strategy. We tell clients not to focus on individual keywords, since the semantic profile of a page—the page’s tendency to use related terms and synonyms that appeal to the searcher’s intent—is more important.

But search for “turkey” and “nicotine,” and you’ll inevitably get pages about “quitting cigarettes cold turkey.” Even if you perform a long-tail search (for instance, “Do turkeys in Illinois eat cigarette butts on the side of the highway because they are addicted to nicotine”), the semantic link between “turkey,” “cigarette,” and “human smoking” is too strong.

The lesson is to be careful when branding. Think about how keywords interact. Consider whether you’re using phrases that could be misinterpreted by semantic search—and when that’s the case, be ready to change your strategy. When in doubt, create as much content geared specifically towards your audience as possible. 

Another crucial lesson: Don’t spend all afternoon arguing about turkeys, or you’ll have to write a blog about it to justify the lost productivity.

Recently, we had a few clients ask whether they should be putting a “noindex” or “nofollow” tag on their blog category, author, and tag pages. WordPress creates these pages to provide another avenue for site organization; they’re potentially useful to your users, and if you’re creating content on an ongoing basis, it’s usually a good idea to leave them in place.

But should those pages be crawlable? Won’t search engines see them as duplicate content, since they contain some of the same language as your blogs?

Plugins like Yoast give you an easy way to noindex these pages. In Yoast, the setting in question looks something like the image below.

Yoast giveth, and Yoast taketh away.

Simply click those “noindex” buttons, and you’ll, uh, noindex the pages. It’s not rocket science.

Of course, before you take that step, you’ll have to determine whether or not you actually want those pages to be noindexed. You certainly don’t want to nofollow them, since there’s no real benefit to doing that (and the nofollow tag shouldn’t be commonly used, anyway; that’s a subject for another blog).

Here are the questions you should ask before using the noindex tag anywhere.

Is this page useful to readers in a unique way, and does it have enough content? If so, Google will probably want the option to show it in search.

“But wait,” you say, “these pages aren’t useful, and I’m worried that they’re preventing me from achieving my keyword ranking goals.”

First of all, stop talking out loud at your computer. I’m not the NSA, and I can’t hear you through the monitor (usually). Second, you’re probably not cannibalizing your own search ranking, because that’s really hard to do.

Here’s why: If you’ve got two pages that are great responses for a given query, search engines will simply show both. They’re generally not going to interpret your tag or category page as duplicate content, since hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites use those page types for organization; Google absolutely understands why they’re there and what they do. Google is smart. Google is wise. All praise Google.

Search for FiveThirtyEight’s reportage on Jon Ossoff, for instance, and the tag page comes up first, followed by FiveThirtyEight’s articles on the Congressional challenger. Google interpreted the tag page just fine, and determined that it was the best response to my query.

And you know what? Google got it right. That page provided a better resource than any of the individual blogs.

I should note that my approach here is atypical; many SEOs insist on noindexing tag pages by default. In fairness, there are some instances in which you’d want a blog tag, category, or author page to stop showing up in search.

• If your site is new or extremely small, the blog tag pages will likely be very low quality. They may list a single blog, and if that’s the case, the blog would surely be a better query response.
• You also might not use blog tags. In this case, I’d disable the tags entirely, but noindexing the pages is still an option, I guess, if you’re lazy. Are you lazy? Don’t be lazy.
•  You might have a single author, in which case the “author” pages are redundant. In that case, again, I’d just remove the actual author pages—why trust a noindex tag when you can scrub your site of redundancy?

I would noindex these types of pages in one situation: If I had a small site that was adding content slowly, and I believed that the tag/category/author pages would be useful at a later date. That situation is extremely common; if you’re just now starting a blog, for instance, this is the approach to take. In fact, we noindex our tag/category/author pages for this very reason.

Also, I don’t post as often as I should, since I’m usually busy writing stuff for clients, and our category pages are pretty bad as a result. The shoemaker’s children have no shoes.   

But what about the dreaded duplicate content penalty?

Well, these organizational pages aren’t really duplicate content—they serve a unique purpose. And the whole “duplicate content penalty” might be scary, but it’s usually not a major concern if you’re not plagiarizing.

In most cases, if Google sees similar content on two pages, it’ll simply choose one of the pages to rank—it won’t ban your domain or anything like that. You’re not getting a manual penalty unless you’ve been doing some shady stuff.   

The bottom line is that tag/category/author pages are absolutely fine on larger sites. On growing sites, the noindex tag is fine, but realize that it’s just a suggestion (and Google frequently ignores that suggestion if it thinks you’re mistaken). And before using any SEO directive, make sure that you’re not missing a cleaner solution.

Oh, and if you vehemently disagree with this post, we’d love to hear why. Post a comment below and I’ll respond (and call you names behind your back).