Templating got me to 33,620 pages. Indexing them was the hard part.

May 21, 2026 · 5:00 AM UTC ·8 min read · 0 reactions · 0 comments · 31 views

TL;DR · WeSearch summary

The author shares insights from their experience with programmatic SEO, highlighting the challenges of indexing a large number of templated pages. Despite generating 33,620 pages, only a small fraction were indexed, with most traffic coming from a limited number of those pages. Key lessons learned include the importance of unique content and the competition between different URL types for indexing.

Key facts

▪The author created 33,620 templated pages but only about 6,200 were indexed by Google.
▪Most of the organic traffic came from the indexed pages, which represented only 18% of the total pages created.
▪The author learned that templated content must vary significantly to avoid being flagged as low-quality by Google's algorithms.

About this source

DEV.to (Top) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 4,924 of its stories.

All DEV.to (Top) coverage →

Original article

DEV.to (Top)

Read full at DEV.to (Top) →

Story provenance

Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record

inspect →

Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.

Record

Original publisher	DEV.to (Top)
Canonical URL	https://dev.to/gaspricecheck/templating-got-me-to-33620-pages-indexing-them-was-the-hard-part-kem
Publication time	Thu, 21 May 2026 05:00:00 +0000
Retrieval time	2026-05-21T05:05:03.495Z
Last seen	2026-05-21T05:05:03.495Z
Headline source	Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite)
Excerpt source	publisher body
Excerpt method	First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited.
Summary	WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer)
Summary source text	contentText
Citation coverage	Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL.
Cluster	1idCNOKVOr45
Cluster logic	Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison.
Ranking reason	Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking.
Publisher visit	Yes — open original
Substitutes article?	No — link-out required for full text

Rights status (four layers)

Publisher-declared

No publisher-confirmed rights record for this source yet.

Machine-readable

No source-specific machine-readable restriction detected beyond the public feed.

WeSearch interpretation

WeSearch declared handling (basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed). This is WeSearch policy, not a legal grant on the publisher's behalf.

Unknown

Retrieval and training permissions are not asserted unless the publisher confirms them.

WeSearch handling by dimension

Indexing	May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)?	Allowed
Snippet	May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown?	Allowed
AI summary	May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article?	Limited
Retrieval / RAG	May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation?	Not asserted
Model training	May the content be used to train AI models?	Not asserted
Commercial reuse	May the content be reused commercially?	Not permitted

Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.

Open original publisher → Source rights JSON → Machine-readable provenance → Rights framework → WESEARCH-STORY-PROVENANCE-V1

Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand

try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3905345) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } GasPriceCheck Posted on May 21 Templating got me to 33,620 pages. Indexing them was the hard part. #nextjs #webdev #javascript #seo I had a fantasy. The fantasy was that programmatic SEO would let me skip the part where you write 200 individual articles and trick Google into ranking them. I had a structured dataset (US ZIP codes, cities, states) and a templated page generator. So I shipped 33,620 pages overnight. Then I sat back and waited for the long-tail traffic to roll in.

…

Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).

Anonymous · no account needed

Discussion

0 comments