Will duplicate articles with changed titles help me rank for multiple keywords?

Question

For example, I have an article about how to take photos in low light. This article is applicable to several cameras. The explanation is exactly the same for all these cameras. I currently have a single article titled: "foo photo CAMERA1, CAMERA2 and CAMERA3".

To get better rankings (top positon) for the various cameras, should I copy the same article for each device? One for CAMERA1, one for CAMERA2, and one for CAMERA3)? Only the title would be different, any other content will be exactly the same.

In that way, the article could be an exact match of what the user searches for. But all the articles will be duplicated 3 times.

Answer 1

Duplicating pages to better target the title for keywords is not an effective SEO strategy. There are two things that will work against you:

1. Google detects when pages are substantially duplicate and chooses just one of them to index. If you have three pages that only differ in their title, only one of them has a chance of getting indexed.
2. Google see such practices as spammy and may penalize sites that duplicate pages for keyword optimization purposes.

Instead it is better to use all the keywords in a single page as you have been doing.

References:

Doorway pages - Search Console Help

Doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination.

What is duplicate content and how can I avoid being penalized for it on my site?

Answer 2

You can be certain of one thing: Google does all they can to give people the info they are looking for. Tools on how to tell genuine search querry info have changed over time - and will change. But the goal remains the same.

That's why I'm certain that duplicating content for no reason but trying to "outsmart Google" is not going to end well. At least not in the long run.

You can pull tricks, play cat and mouse. Might work if you are selling something, need to be highly ranked and sell as many as you can as quickly as you can. Still, even for those purposes, I'd say it's also better in the long run to not try tricking either Google, or visitors.

The beauty of hyperlinks is what they do. Making an article on low light shooting, and linking it to each camera would make a lot more sense. It would also make sense to let the visitors know what you wrote here: it's practically the same for all these cameras (perhaps include links to each camera page as they are listed).

It is what I do and the results are just fine in terms of Google ranking. Also the website is easy to navigate and understand.

For topics that are similar, but with enough difference to call for (need) separate pages (with seaparate titles) in order to be properly explained, I make separate pages. Info does have many similar keywords, but it's not the same. Such articles are ranked in a way described in the previous answer here as "doorway pages" - one Google search querry returning 3 different pages from my website as the top 3 results. However, the topics are genuinely different and each page explains a different aspect, or even term, but with some similar keywords. Photo example I can think of would be separate articles for "camera lens", "camera li-io batteries", "camera case", all being listed when someone searches "camera equipment" (if all those terms are not considered equimpent and such word would not be used in the articles, then I've chosen a poor example, sorry).

Answer 3

The content must be unique in any case. I recommend that you make one page with the necessary content and specify a few keywords on one page. It will be more effective in comparison with duplication of content.