The Open Alternative To directory I launched in April has 80 programmatic pages — one per SaaS tool it covers. The first AdSense submission came back rejected. The scaled content abuse flag led to pruning down to 18 indexed pages. The re-application is a single-site attempt, and it required building E-E-A-T infrastructure I'd been treating as optional.
Here's what I built, what I think matters versus what doesn't, and what I still don't know.
What E-E-A-T actually means for a programmatic directory
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is Google's framework, but AdSense doesn't publish its review rubric. My interpretation after two rejections: reviewers check whether the site has demonstrable decision logic that a scraper wouldn't replicate.
For a programmatic directory, that question narrows to something specific: can a reader understand why a page shows the alternatives it does, why they're ordered the way they are, and who made that call? A page that lists "Top 5 alternatives to Datadog" with no explanation of how the list was constructed is indistinguishable from scraped content, regardless of how sophisticated the generation was.
