← the writing directories & programmatic seo · 6 essays

Directories & Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO at scale, directory site monetisation, and the architecture behind HostList.io. Templates, content quality gates, and avoiding Google AI-slop penalties.

read the directories & programmatic seo guide first →

13 jul 2026 Programmatic SEO Quality Gates: Why I Hold 15% of Pages Back Not every programmatically generated page deserves to be indexed. I hold roughly 15% of pages out of Google's index on every pSEO build I run, and it's the single decision that's improved ranking velocity more than any other.
3 may 2026 Programmatic SEO Quality Gates: Avoiding the AI Slop Penalty Programmatic SEO at scale is a trap if you don't build quality gates into the pipeline. Here's how I protect 12,000+ sites from Google's AI content penalties, with specific tools, thresholds, and hard-won mistakes.
30 apr 2026 How to Monetise a Directory Site Without Selling Affiliate Spam Most directory sites die broke or become link farms. There's a third path, one that doesn't involve stuffing every listing with Amazon affiliate codes and hoping nobody notices. Here's how it actually works.
30 apr 2026 Programmatic SEO for Directory Sites That Actually Rank in 2026 Most programmatic SEO directories get crawled, indexed, and promptly ignored. Here's what separates the ones that rank, from data architecture to internal linking, based on building 12,000+ sites.
30 apr 2026 How I Built a 25,000-Page Directory in Next.js: HostList Post-Mortem I built a 25,000-page hosting directory in Next.js, made a dozen bad calls along the way, and learned more about large-scale static generation than any tutorial ever taught me. Here's the full post-mortem.
29 apr 2026 What I Learned Building Hostlist: 25,000 Web Hosts I spent months building Hostlist, a directory covering 25,000 web hosts. The data wrangling, the WordPress pain, the monetisation dead-ends, here's the unfiltered version of what I learned.