Why Year-Make-Model (YMM) Pages Are Usually a Bad SEO Strategy

At first glance, creating a bunch of Year-Make-Model (YMM) pages might seem like a great SEO strategy. After all, YMM is how many people think about their vehicles. Shouldn’t your website match how customers search?

Not so fast.

In our experience working with aftermarket parts and accessories retailers, the “build lots of YMM pages” approach tends to fail more often than not. Here’s why.

1. More Pages ≠ Better Rankings

It’s tempting to assume that more content means more opportunities to rank. But in practice, the opposite is often true.

When a website has tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands—of pages, they can dilute overall site quality in Google’s eyes. The reason? Most of those pages are low quality. And the pages are low quality because it’s borderline impossible to create thousands of awesome, high quality pages that are worth indexing.

SearchEngineLand has a great article on content pruning that breaks down the importance of trimming unremarkable or redundant pages. And in our agency’s experience, reducing page count almost always leads to better rankings. If you’re flooding your site with near-duplicate YMM pages, you’re probably hurting your rankings.

Of course, if you run a major brand with massive search equity (like AutoZone), you would be the exception to the rule. But there are maybe 10 companies in our industry that fall into that category.

2. Most YMM Pages Are Full of Duplicate Content

Let’s say you’re selling performance accessories for Chevy Silverado trucks. You might be tempted to create separate pages for the 2001, 2002, and 2003 models.

The problem? These pages will almost certainly list the same set of products. That means 90% or more of the page content is duplicated across each version. Here’s a real-world example from AutoZone:

• 2001 Silverado 2500 HD Engine Page
• 2002 Silverado 2500 HD Engine Page
• 2003 Silverado 2500 HD Engine Page

These pages are almost identical—and Google knows it. Large retailers like AutoZone can sometimes get away with creating a lot of duplicate content because of their brand authority, but if we had access to AutoZone’s analytics (we don’t) we’d guess these pages don’t bring in much traffic.

But what about creating unique content for each page? Won’t that fix it?

In the old days, a common workaround to the duplicate content was to write unique blurbs for each YMM page. We (Spork) used that technique extensively throughout the 2010s. It worked great for a while, but about 5 years ago we noticed the traffic die off.

With A.I., it’s possible to do more with unique content, but it’s risky (see below).

3. Accessories Customers Don’t Usually Search by YMM

This one might surprise you, but the data is clear.

In a recent analysis of one client’s account – and going back nearly three years – we found that only a single-digit percentage of all search queries included a model year. 90%+ of the time, accessories shoppers aren’t typing in a full year-make-model search.

Instead, they’re searching by part type, brand, or feature—think “off-road light bar,” “Bilstein shocks,” or “custom aluminum driveshaft.”

NOTE: YMM-specific searches are more common in the replacement parts world than in the accessories space, but they’re not super popular in that world either…we don’t recommend a YMM strategy for most companies.

Important: Google’s Dim View of Low-Quality AI Content

One last point worth mentioning: A major Google update in March 2024 cracked down hard on AI-generated content lacking originality or depth. If you’re considering using AI to generate hundreds or thousands of YMM pages, you could be walking into a trap.

We would summarize Google’s view of A.I. content as follows:

• Most of us hate finding generic A.I. generated content when we search.
• Google knows most of us hate generic A.I. generated content.
• Because Google knows we hate it, Google will make sure generic A.I. generated content doesn’t rank.

Bulk-generated YMM pages are likely to be ignored, deindexed, or even result in a penalty if they’re generic enough.

What to Do Instead

If you’re trying to grow organic traffic to your parts or accessories site, here’s what we recommend instead of mass-producing YMM pages:

• Focus on high-intent categories. Build out content and landing pages for the parts and upgrades your customers actually search for.
• Focus on brands. A lot of the people buying accessories online are searching by brand name.
• Offer a year-make-model lookup tool. Instead of creating static YMM specific pages, let customers filter by year/make/model.
• Invest in quality content marketing. Videos that compare, review or install products are gold. Videos and written content that explain details and answer specific questions are evergreen. Focus your efforts accordingly.

Final Thoughts

The “more is better” approach to SEO doesn’t work when the “more” is low-value, A.I. generated garbage. YMM pages may sound strategic, but they often waste time, budget, and crawl equity—especially in the accessories market where model-year searches are relatively rare.

Want help crafting a smarter, data-driven content and SEO strategy? Contact us—we’ll help you focus on what actually moves the needle.