The quality gate: which rows deserve a programmatic page
Short answer: Not every row should become a page. Publish a row only if it has at least 4 real facts, shows some search demand, is not a twin of another row, and does not compete with a page you already have.
The fastest way to hurt a whole page set is to publish its weakest pages. Thin pages drag down the good ones and waste Google's crawl time. So every row passes a gate first.
My gate
- Data. At least 4 facts filled in. Missing data is not a page.
- Demand. The row's own search shows impressions in Search Console, or real search volume. No signal, no page.
- No twins. Two rows with the same facts become one page.
- No clash. If a page you already have ranks for that search, improve that page instead.
Example: a home services site
Start: 300 city rows.
212 had fewer than 4 facts, because the company had done under 5 jobs there.
Of the 88 left, 24 had no impressions for any search with the city name.
64 pages went live. The rest wait for real data. You can always add rows later. Cleaning up a hurt set takes much longer.
Remember the page type you marked in lesson 1? Run the same gate on it. Pages that fail: improve them, merge them, or set them to noindex. Do not leave them as they are.
Your 10-minute task: Add a publish column
- Add a column called publish to your dataset.
- Write the gate as a formula: facts filled is 4 or more AND impressions above 0.
- Count the rows that pass.
- Fewer than 10? The pattern is too thin for now. Go back to lesson 4 and try the next one.
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