Programmatic SEO for ecommerce shopify

Hello I have a client who has an ecommerce store that sells custom art. I have hundreds of different sizes of artwork and have noticed that there is an opportunity for programmatic SEO. They are on Shopify.

For example 4x5 red artwork, 4x5 green artwork, 4x4 red artwork, 4x4 yellow art work, so on. Usually when someone has an exact size and some descriptor words they are likely to buy, so even the volume may be low the quality of these clicks would be super high. I have a lot of these descriptions in the product title and url and get found often because of these.

There are about 8,000 products and currently I have about 300 collection pages without doing any pSEO. I am very worried about crawl budget (tbh I don't know much about this)

The new Google core update has scared me from mass creation of pages. I've seen some competitors do it with no content but just a search filter. I've also heard that Wayfair in specific was hit hard for doing this kind of programmatic SEO.

It would be crazy to create a new collection page with unique text for these hundreds of different options no?

I know that if you stick to a few a month that the probably is getting hit is much less. Do I just create a few every month with just search filters? Is that even possible with Shopify? If so, how many per month?

I would appreciate any help.

It makes more sense to me to do pSEO for product pages.
Since search engines know that each product variation isn’t spam, imagine your client doesn’t want to bundle one artwork with options for different colors and instead creates a separate page for each color?
Tbh i will test with any new product they push first before doing anything on existing pages.

It’s safer to add only a few smart filter pages each month instead of making hundreds at once on Shopify.

Definitelly don’t do hundreds in a shirt time.

That is the biggest giveaway and will highly likely trigger a filter.

Programmatic SEO on Shopify can work but the real risk isn’t “too many pages,”

it’s too many low-value, duplicate filter pages being indexed.

Keep filter URLs noindex, only create high-intent collections and start small (10–20/month) while monitoring performance. Focus on user intent + internal linking before scaling.

No need to roll out hundreds of pages at once. On Shopify, just create a few high value programmatic collection pages each month, add some unique text, and use filters instead of thin auto generated content. This keeps things safe with Google and avoids crawl budget issues.