A complete guide to Programmatic SEO

I've got a question on programmatic SEO... how will it affect your overall website's link authority?

I've been going through Brian Dean's Content-Led SEO course on Semrush and in one of the sections he makes the point that it's better to have fewer high-quality content pages, and thousands of thousands of long-tail content pages.

The other big problem with long-tails is that the long-tail approach dilutes your site's link authority, also known as PageRank.

After all, for the long-tail keyword approach to work, you need to publish LOTS of pages, each optimized around a different long-tail term.

And all those pages can really hurt your SEO.

Why?

It's simple: the more pages you have on your site, the more your link authority gets diluted across those pages.

For example, at Backlinko right now, I've published relatively few blog posts. And as you've already seen, I rank for some very competitive keywords above sites with thousands of pages.

And because each page on my site has a lot of concentrated link authority, they rank for super- competitive keywords. But if I had 10,000 pages, my link authority would be diluted across all of those 10,000 pages, and my site wouldn't rank nearly as well.

In fact, back when I did SEO client work, I had a little secret weapon that would usually help improve my client's rankings within days.

What was that secret weapon? Deleting pages from their site.

When I deleted pages, their link authority would be more concentrated on their important pages, and their rankings would improve.

https://www.semrush.com/academy/courses/content-led-seo-course-with-brian-dean/choose-a-medium-tail-keyword