Scaled Content Abuse: Do's and Don'ts for SEO

For the last few years, the marketing space has been evolving rapidly with the introduction of AI-powered tools for everything from analytics and insights to content generation. As this happens, many people have been wondering if Google is going to "do something about it". "It", in this case, refers to using AI to generate marketing content, putting many content creators out of work and saturating niches.

This is not a post about AI.

The truth is, Google has already done something about this problem, but what they see as a problem and what we outsiders see as a problem are different problems.

The issue, as far as Google is concerned, is algorithmically generated scaled content. While that sounds like a euphemism for AI content, it really isn't. In fact, Google has had those rules in place since long before AI existed, because "algorithmically generated" or "automatically created" can mean a lot of things that don't involve LLMs.

Remember article spinners? Remember being able to put (keywords|search terms|important phrases) in a program to create "unique" content using various combinations? Remember going to Textbroker or Mechanical Turk and buying blog posts for $5 per 2,000 words? Yeah; that's all scaled content too.

But there's a twist! Google doesn't even dislike scaled content. They dislike scaled content abuse. 

What does all of this mean, where is the line drawn, and what can and can't you do? It's a surprisingly tricky topic, so I wanted to cover it here today.

What is Scaled Content?

Scaled content, as a concept, is pretty simple. Any time you're spinning up a website or a new category, and you blitz out a few dozen (or a few hundred, or a few thousand) pages, that's scaled content.

It gets tricky when you think about what scale means on different, well, scales.

Look at my site. I publish one blog post per week, more or less. If I were to bump up to one post per day, to me, that would be rapidly scaling my content.

But then you look at a site like Forbes, which publishes hundreds (estimates range from 150 to 500) of pieces of content per day. Sure, they cover way, way more different topics than I do, but if scale is the only thing that matters, surely they would be slapped for it, right? Yet they aren't.

So, clearly, scaled content can work fine if scale itself is the only determining factor. But, of course, you and I both know it isn't.

What is Scaled Content Abuse?

The key is value. Scaled content is fine if it's good, useful, or interesting. That's why news sites can post hundreds of pages every day; they're all relevant news pieces. It's also why much smaller, much slower sites are frequently slapped; everything they post is derivative or a copy of something else.

One example I always think of is in the video gaming space. Every now and then, some company pops up with the goal of becoming The Big Resource For Gaming Information. They do a huge amount of keyword research on every question someone could ask about a video game, and make pages for all of them. They algorithmically spin out thousands of pages for popular games.

The problem is, all of their information is either a) stolen from a better, more established site, or b) nonexistent. 

Take Pokemon, for example. Pokemon is immensely popular, has been for years, and has some very well-established resources for pretty much anything you could want to ask. But now, if you search for a Pokemon-related question, you're going to get posts from Game8, Pokeos, RankedBoost, Gamepur, Powerpyx, and so on. The major resources (Serebii and Bulbapedia) are drowned out, even though they're much more detailed, better established, and more reliable. 

The thing is, if you check this blog post in a year, half of the sites I listed there are going to be gone, while the long-running resources will still exist. The churn is real.

This is a sign of scaled content abuse: content that is scaled with the pure and simple goal of getting as many pages to rank for as many keywords as possible, to show up as highly in the AI Overviews as possible, and to drag in as much traffic from less sophisticated browsers as possible.

Now, here's the thing: the information on these pages is fine. There's nothing wrong with the data. The sites that can't even reasonably populate their pages don't last long.

The problem is, there's nothing of real value there either. I know I'm using a video game as an example, but you can see this in pretty much any industry. You've probably seen a lot of sites in the last year or two that you had never seen before, and now you're seeing them more and more. A lot of these are scaled, often in abusive ways, but the algorithm hasn't purged them yet.

What Google Says

Google has some fine words to say about scaled content abuse. Give this a gander:

"Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether content is created purely through automation isn't always as clear. To better address these techniques, we're strengthening our policy to focus on this abusive behavior - producing content at scale to boost search ranking - whether automation, humans or a combination are involved. This will allow us to take action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale, like pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver helpful content."

This is part of a post about Google's search algorithm and anti-spam updates… from March 2024. Obviously, this problem has been on their radar for a while now.

In Google's Search Central, the resource you're meant to use as your SEO bible, this is what they say:

"Scaled content abuse is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. This abusive practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it's created.

Examples of scaled content abuse include, but are not limited to:

• Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users
• Scraping feeds, search results, or other content to generate many pages (including through automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques), where little value is provided to users
• Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding value
• Creating multiple sites with the intent of hiding the scaled nature of the content
• Creating many pages where the content makes little or no sense to a reader but contains search keywords

If you're hosting such content on your site, exclude it from Search."

You can see they call out AI here, but AI is just a drop in the bucket. AI is correlated to scaled content abuse because it makes scaled content abuse easy, but not all AI content is abusive, and not all abusive content is scaled.

How to Leverage Scaled Content Properly

Is it possible to use tools (or people) to scale content effectively, without risking being flagged for scaled content abuse?

Absolutely.

You just have to do it the right way. As always with Google, that means making sure each post you create, scaled or not, has real value in it for your users.

I've read a bunch of the existing guides, worked out my own thoughts on the matter, and put together this list of Dos and Don'ts for scaling content. Let's start with what not to do.

The Don'ts of Scaled Content

All of the Don'ts here are things that can get your site penalized for scaled content abuse. If you're doing them, you risk being pushed down in the search results, issued a spam penalty, or deindexed entirely.

Don't just scrape content from other sources. While this works in the short term, "works in the short term" is true of most black-hat marketing techniques. If you're trying to "add value" by just aggregating a handful of sources into one, you really aren't adding value at all. I've seen a lot of sites try to add value without actually adding anything.

• A minor personal story before a recipe doesn't make the recipe more unique.
• A short summary or description ahead of copied content doesn't add anything.
• An introduction to the author of the content you're copying isn't value.

If you're copying something from another source, it needs to be substantially transformative or add some serious, unique insights. 

A big offender here is the data aggregation site. I see a lot of these, where site owners compile a bunch of case studies or data sources and provide stats, but there's nothing really useful attached to it. Why should someone go to your site rather than the sites hosting the studies? You need analysis, you need to point out gaps and flaws, you need to extoll virtues, or whatever other value your unique perspective adds.

Increasingly, the AI Overviews are covering the bases for the basic content. You need value from uniqueness, insights, and EEAT. If everything in your post could be in the AI Overview before you publish, it's not unique enough.

Don't blame AI for failures. Using AI to scale content is frequently a terrible idea, but it's not universally a terrible idea. I've seen a lot of big sites use it successfully, including a few you would never suspect of using AI.

The key is that the AI alone isn't enough. You need human editing and oversight. You need fact-checking. But, more importantly, you need human-generated unique input.

What do I mean? 

Here's the thing: LLMs are statistical models of language, and by the very foundation of how they function, they produce something substantively similar to what has come before. They are, by definition, incapable of true uniqueness.

Uniqueness is the problem the AI companies are trying to solve, too. An AI-generated image of a person with twelve fingers and three arms is unique, but it's wrong. The same thing happens in text, which is what hallucinations are. In trying to solve hallucinations, the LLMs need to reduce uniqueness.

But you need uniqueness and value in your scaled content. So, if you're going to use AI to generate content, you need unique insights to seed it. Don't start with a common topic and expect the AI to generate the value. Start with the value and use the AI to frame it with the non-unique context.

Don't assume success from humans. This is the flip side of the above. Many people assume that just because a human is writing the content, it means the content is unique and has value. Even I'm guilty of that, and I've removed no small number of blog posts I've published over the years because that turned out to not be true.

It's easy to read something, rewrite it, and think you've added value. It's especially easy if you've been doing that for years and haven't changed while the world changes around you. It used to work! A lot of things used to work. 

The Dos of Scaled Content

So, how do you scale content the right way? Walk to the beat of the drum Google has been hammering at for a decade now: add value for humans. The rest will follow.

Do start with the core value of the content. Yes, I know, this is difficult with scaling. You need to do some serious thinking about your topics, and figure out where the unique value is for each of them, before you can throw scaling at them.

Keyword research? That's your starting point. Go beyond just a keyword and a word count. 

These days, my keyword research documents have a "USP" column. It's not about the sales potential, though. It's where I think about the topic and write an elevator pitch for what I'm bringing to the table. 

• What can I say about the topic based on where I live?
• What can I say about the topic based on my years as a marketer?
• What can I say about the topic synthesized from other sources?
• How can I contextualize the topic with other current events?
• How can I bring in outside expertise to boost what I have to add?

I don't always nail it, but that's been true about every person doing content marketing for as long as content marketing has existed.

Do find unique information for your content. The absolute best way to do this is by creating your own information. Do a case study, figure out ten insights from it, and scale ten unique posts using those insights. 

Of course, scaling when you're doing a bunch of unique research is hardly scaling at all. So, find other ways to bring unique information into your content. Look for offline resources. Reach out to others and solicit unique advice. Find a framework to contextualize other sources of information in a unique way.

If this sounds a lot like the previous tip, it kind of is. Everything centers around value, so all of the Dos are going to be ways to find and leverage that value.

Do scale slowly. It sounds like an oxymoron, but one of the big red flags Google looks for is a rapid increase in scaling. Like I said, I've been publishing a blog post more or less once a week for years. If I suddenly jump to publishing 100 per week, that's a huge sign that something is fishy. 

There are also a lot of "tricks" to try to work around this. I've seen sites spin out a bunch of domains for their categories and subtopics, but interlink them all, trying to pretend that 500 new blog posts per week isn't scaled abuse just because it's split across 50 domains. Google has a word for that: it's a PBN, and it's just going to mean you have 50 domains penalized instead of one.

Since value is your focus, start with a sustainable level of value creation. Scaling tools help you turn a list of ideas into a list of outlines, then into a list of basic blog posts, then into polished pieces of content. Ramp it up. I could go from one to two, to five, to ten blog posts per week, increasing slowly over the course of a couple of months. That would look a lot more natural.

Again, I cannot hammer this home hard enough: start with the value. All else follows.

What About Programmatic SEO?

Something I've seen a lot, adjacent to scaled content, is programmatic SEO. This has always been on the edge of black hat, part of scaled content abuse but done just barely good enough to escape whatever the current filter bar is.

This post is a great example of what a lot of people think works, but doesn't.

Even just reading the TL;DR at the top gives away the game:

"The new standard: Each page must have ≥60% different content, pull from 3+ sources, and provide value beyond a results page."

This is building a template for LLMs to pretend to have value. This is also not going to work, at least not for very long. Again: the technical uniqueness of the content is not value, and just because you pull from three or more sources doesn't mean you're providing any actual value from the information you gather.

Programmatic SEO can work, in very specific situations. In fact, that article even lists some: things like Zillow.

These are places where the heavily templated and not-technically-unique value is the value. Where the aggregation is the point. Zillow works because of the consistency, because you know what to expect, and those expectations are the goal. If Zillow tried to spin up a unique insight page for each home listing, it would be unusable.

Is Scaled Content Possible in 2026 and Beyond?

Yes, of course it is. It will always be possible and viable, as long as you do it properly.

As always, it's all about the value. Know why you're scaling, and do it with purpose. Include something that makes your content stand out as something unique, not just another in the long line of spun and scraped content.

The mistake most people make is getting the process backward. They start with the goal of scaling, and try to figure out how to make it work. The truth is, you need to get something that works, and then figure out how to scale it.