How to Avoid Failure with Scaled Content
Scaled content is changing SEO. Google penalizes repetitive and low-quality content.
Today we discuss something that is changing the way SEO is done and websites are built: scaled content, or content produced on a large scale, often quickly and repetitively.
Imagine a website that, overnight, decides to become the ultimate guide to Italian food. It starts churning out articles one after another: "The best pizzerias in Naples," then "The best pizzerias in Rome," "The best pizzerias in Florence"... and it doesn't stop. It covers every city, town, and village in Italy, always with the same template: a list of places, a few lines copied here and there, a couple of stock photos, and off to the next one. Or think of a tech blog that decides to review all the gadgets of the moment: "The 10 best smartphones under 300 euros in 2026," "The 10 best wireless earbuds in 2026," "The 10 best fast chargers in 2026"... and continues like this for every possible category, changing only a few words and numbers.
It’s not that these articles are necessarily bad or false. It’s that they all come out the same, like they were printed with the same mold. They only vary the name of the city, the product, or the year, but in the end, they say the same things, with the same phrases, the same flat tone. The idea behind it is simple: fill the internet with pages that intercept any search someone might make, hoping that someone will click on them. And for a while, it worked.
In past years, it was a tactic that worked reasonably well. Before 2024, many sites grew precisely this way: tools to automatically generate pages, templates that only changed the keyword, short but numerous articles. Especially in local niches, tourism, and product reviews.
Then came March 2024. Google updated its spam policies and officially introduced the concept of scaled content abuse. It didn’t say "forbidden to make lots of content," but clarified that if you produce pages in bulk with the primary purpose of manipulating rankings, without genuinely helping users, it is a practice that violates the rules. They talked about low-quality or non-original content generated at scale, often automated.
From then on, Google updates followed: various spam updates in 2024, then August 2025 with an even stronger focus on these patterns, and in 2026 Google’s AI became very good at recognizing when a site has tons of similar pages that do not add unique value.
It doesn’t matter if you use AI or not. You can write everything by hand, but if you copy-paste the same template changing only the name of the city or the product, the result is the same: pages that look like clones. Google looks at the signals: structural duplication, texts that are too similar, lack of real depth, personal experiences, fresh data.
Some concrete examples that are still seen: - Sites that churn out 50–100 articles a month on long-tail keyword variants, but each piece is 300 words with the same recycled phrases. - Local guides that exist only to intercept voice searches, but say nothing that isn’t already found on TripAdvisor or Google Maps.
In 2026, the direction is clear: Google wants to reward those who invest in content that truly solves a problem, that brings something new (original photos, personal opinions, field tests, updates over time). It doesn’t matter if you create 10 or 1000: what matters is whether each of those pieces of content is worth existing on its own.
