Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Keyword Synonyms And Duplicate Content

Posted by nat.colley on 12/29/2008 at 3:23 PM ET 50 Points
I originally posted this question on the Google Adwords Help Forum last week, but got ZERO answers - surprise surprise :-(. I don't know why they are so secretive over there, but I'm sure others would benefit from the correct answer to this question:

If I have two or more synonyms that people search for to find me, it makes sense to have them in separate ad groups with separate keywords. It would then follow that each adgroup would have it's own landing page on my site. But then how do I keep from being penalized for duplicate content since, apart from the synonyms, the landing pages are pretty much the same? They are talking about the same things, after all, just with different keywords/synonyms. The advice on the duplicate content page in google webmaster help says I should consider not having duplicate pages indexed, but that defeats the whole purpose of having the alternate keyword and being found no matter how people might search for me. I have seen this issue raised but not answered on other forums. I would like a clear, unambiguous, authoritative or well sourced (not "um, I think...") answer to this problem. Thank you.

p.s. - I think this question is worth way more than 50 points, but that's all I can offer right now.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by excellira on 12/29/2008 at 3:44 PM Member
    Disallow in robots.txt or "noindex, follow" the pages that are duplicates while leaving the original unrestricted. This way you can have multiple versions of the same page permitting one to be indexed and the others to test with.
  • Posted by excellira on 12/29/2008 at 3:48 PM Member
    Also, you can rewrite the duplicate versions so that they are no longer duplicates. This will enable you to index and rank for more keyword phrases. If this is not an issue and your only concern is PPC then my first post will do the trick.

    https://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
    https://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html
  • Posted by melissa on 12/29/2008 at 6:32 PM Member
    It is difficult to answer your question without knowing what these synonyms are, or seeing the landing pages in question - is there any way you can post those for us to review?

    The reason I ask is that you may not need separate ad groups for these synonyms - you may in fact be able to utilize the same ad group, and the same landing page, to run your campaign.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 12/30/2008 at 8:01 AM Member
    From the organic side, why not use both keywords interchangeably on your site? This won't give you fine control, but will allow for organic search success.
  • Posted by excellira on 12/30/2008 at 9:53 AM Member
    It's often difficult to optimize a page for more than one keyword phrase. A properly optimized page would include its keyword phrase(s) in the title, h1, and alt tags. I agree that it can be done but more often than not the page ends up looking spammy or reads poorly.
  • Posted by nat.colley on 12/31/2008 at 1:56 PM Author
    Ok, Melissa, here are the links to my pages. Trinity and Jay, I very much want to get the organic listings as high as possible, that's why this became an issue for me. Thx.

    The keyword synonyms are attorney, lawyer, law firm, and their plurals. The variant landing pages are

    [inactive link removed]

    [inactive link removed]

    http://vetyourlawyer.com/what-i-do/finding-a-business-lawyer/

    As those of you who have been doing this professionally probably already know, I discovered that the plurals are treated as distinct keywords and actually have better quality scores than the singular. I also have to deal with similar but not directly competitive sites using some of the same keywords.

    [Moderator: Inactive link removed from post. 3/14/2011]
  • Posted by excellira on 1/6/2009 at 3:04 PM Accepted
    Back to your original question. If you’re running Adwords, you don’t need to be as concerned about the singular vs plural versions of the KW. You could send both visitors to the same landing page. As an asisde, you could completely exclude the Adwords landing pages from the index and this would allow you to be more creative in how the pages are presented (IE use of images, flash, layout, etc).

    To achieve the best results within the organic listings, you may wish to create singular and plural versions of the page (this you know). You must then rewrite the second page so that the two page versions, while stating the same concept, are unique.

    Along the same vein, while quickly reviewing the links you provided I noticed that a number of pages do not have PageRank. I did a search to see whether file names were duplicated and what I found is that you have several URLs for each post.

    For example, the following URLs lead to the same page but two separate URLs exist:

    [inactive link removed]
    https://vetyourlawyer.com/tag/finding-a-lawyer/

    This is a common issue with blog platforms. You should consider using Disallow in robots.txt or noindex, follow in the header to prevent the /tag/ and /categories/ sections of the web site from being indexed.

    You can do a site: search to find the URLs: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS289US289&q=...
    For example, take a look at the first two listings referenced above in the following URL:

    https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS289US289&q=...


    [Moderator: Inactive link removed from post. 3/14/2011]
  • Posted by nat.colley on 1/7/2009 at 12:20 PM Author
    Thank you.
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