Chapter 33 Exercises: Programmatic and Enterprise SEO at Scale

Work these in order; they climb from recall to judgment. Items marked † have worked solutions in the answers appendix (Appendix H). No answers here — struggle first. Use only free tools where a tool is named (Google Search Console, a site: search, Google Suggest, the Rich Results Test).

Recall and definitions

33.1 † Define programmatic SEO in one sentence, and state the "template + data" formula it rests on.

33.2 In your own words, what is a doorway page, and why does Google treat it as a spam-policy violation rather than merely low-quality content?

33.3 Name the two forces Google says shape crawl budget, and state what each one depends on.

33.4 Distinguish the shared service layer from the unique local layer of a legitimate location page. Which one may be templated across cities, and which one may not — and why?

33.5 † A national franchise generates 4,000 "[service] in [city]" pages from a single template. Each page carries three genuinely local paragraphs, real reviews from that city, and the local franchisee's name, address, and license. Is this legitimate programmatic SEO or doorway spam? Justify your answer against the quality bar.

Applied reasoning

33.6 Explain, using the site-level quality signal and crawl budget, why publishing more pages can actually lower a large site's total organic traffic.

33.7 † Why does a change to a template carry both more leverage and more risk than a change to a single page? Give one concrete example of the leverage and one of the risk.

33.8 A large site's logs show that 60% of verified-Googlebot requests are hitting URLs that return a 301 redirect. Walk through what is most likely happening and the two things you would fix first.

33.9 † A "water heater repair Westbrook" page is indexed and genuinely well written, yet it gets no impressions and no ranking. You discover that no other page on the site links to it. Name the pipeline stage most likely failing (recall Chapter 1) and the fix.

33.10 A newly published programmatic section of 5,000 pages has been live for two months, and most of the pages sit in Search Console as "Discovered – currently not indexed." Give two plausible causes and the first thing you would check.

Diagnose and audit (use a free tool)

33.11 † Open Search Console → Settings → Crawl stats for a site you control. Report the response-code mix (share of 200 vs. 3xx/4xx/5xx) and whether total crawl requests are trending up, flat, or down. Interpret what you see in two or three sentences.

33.12 Run a site:yourdomain search and compare the approximate number of indexed pages to the number you meant to publish. What does a large gap in either direction suggest, and which chapter's tools would you use to investigate?

33.13 † For a real multi-location or service-area business (yours, a client's, or one you research), list its services and the areas it serves, lay out the service×area matrix, and mark the five cells with the clearest real search demand. Use Google Suggest and, if you have access, Search Console query data to justify the picks.

Optimize a page

33.14 Rewrite this keyword-stuffed doorway heading pair into an intent-matching title and <h1> for a genuine location page: Title/H1: "Furnace Repair in Cedar Hills — Furnace Repair Cedar Hills Experts, Furnace Repair Near Me Cedar Hills."

33.15 † Take the mad-libs doorway opening from §33.2 ("Looking for {service} in {city}? … the #1 provider of {service} in {city}!") and rewrite the first three sentences for "furnace repair in Cedar Hills" so they carry real, specific local content. Invent plausible local facts and label them as illustrative.

Read the report

33.16 † Reread Figure 33.2. Only ~22% of Googlebot's requests reach indexable content pages; the rest hit parameter URLs, redirects, 404s, and noindexed pages. State the core problem in one sentence and name the two highest-priority fixes.

33.17 A Crawl stats report shows total crawl requests dropped by roughly 70% over three weeks while average server response time tripled over the same period. What single underlying cause most likely explains both movements, and by what mechanism?

Spot the myth

33.18 † "Programmatic SEO is against Google's guidelines." True or false? Correct the statement, and name what actually violates the guidelines.

33.19 "You should optimize crawl budget on every site." When is this advice wrong, and for what kind of site is it right? Point to the evidence you'd use to decide.

33.20 "More internal links with keyword-rich anchor text always means better rankings." Sort this claim into what's true, where it flips to risk, and what's overstated.

Ethics and risk

33.21 † A client insists you build 300 spun "[service] [city]" pages this week to "catch more local traffic," and implies you'll lose the account if you refuse. Lay out the risk, the most likely outcome, and the honest alternative you would propose instead.

33.22 Is it defensible to publish a service×city page for a city where the business has no presence and no local proof, as long as the copy is generic-but-readable and not obviously spun? Argue your position using the quality bar and the doorway definition.

Enterprise workflow

33.23 † Rewrite this stalled ticket so it would actually get built: "SEO wants us to add schema to the location pages." Include what, why, scope, acceptance criteria, and priority.

33.24 Name three distinct stakeholders an enterprise SEO must persuade before a page-template change can ship, and state what each one primarily cares about.

Internal linking and templates at scale

33.25 † Design the rule-based internal-link modules for a 40-page service×area matrix so that no page is an orphan and every page is within two clicks of the homepage. Describe each module and what it links to.

33.26 Before rolling a template change out to 20,000 pages, list the checks you would run on a small sample first, and explain why "it renders fine in the browser" does not settle it.

Log files and crawl

33.27 † Why must you verify that Googlebot is really Googlebot before analyzing the "Googlebot" lines in your server logs, and how is that verification done?

33.28 Give three things a raw server log reveals about crawling that Search Console's summarized Crawl stats report does not.

Rivertown Strategy-File extensions

33.29 † Apply "Rule 0 — subtract first" to Rivertown's ~75-cell service×city matrix. Propose which ~25 cells to build in the first phase, and state the two criteria you used to choose them.

33.30 † Write the pre-publish "anti-doorway" checklist — three to five yes/no questions — that Rivertown's team must pass before any service×city page goes live, and explain, for each question, what it protects against.