I generated 400 pages in a weekend and tanked the whole site

I generated 400 pages in a weekend and tanked the whole site

Month 9: I got greedy. Built a template — '[City] best [service]' — and spun up 400 pages from a spreadsheet. Each one near-identical: swap the city name, same boilerplate paragraphs. Indexed fast, felt like a cheat code.

Month 11: a core update hit and my whole domain — including the 30 good hand-written pages — dropped 60%. The 400 thin clones had dragged my entire site's quality signal into the gutter. Google judged the site, not just the bad pages.

The setback was brutal: my real earners got punished for the sins of pages I'd made in an afternoon.

The turn: I noindexed 360 of the worst, kept 40 cities where I added genuinely local data — real provider names, real price ranges, a unique intro. Site-wide quality recovered over the next core update and the good pages came back stronger than before.

The takeaway: programmatic pages aren't evil, but mass-produced near-duplicates are a sitewide liability, not a per-page one. One folder of thin clones can sink your best content. If a template page can't carry one genuinely unique fact, it shouldn't be indexed.