Alternative titles or aliases for SEO

Question

I am creating content pages with titles of pages for a non-English language where several words are read similarly.

• Satya Harish Chandra
• Sathya Hareesh Chandhra

This is the name of a movie which can be written in more 6 possible ways given each word can be written in 2 ways. Some times, more than 3-4 ways is possible with multiple ee and d instead of th etc.

A user can search for any of the combinations. I wanted to know if we can feed in similar data to Google and avoid duplicate content by having search engines learn that its the same content or data.

Is there a way to link or point the content as an alias page or define dictionary words for aliases so that search engines make sense out of it?

Answer 1

You shouldn't need to do anything special for this because Google (and other search engines) will automatically also show similar words to what users search for. This is local specific so that a language which does this a lot will definitely be setup to do this heavily on the search engine itself.

According to http://www.googleguide.com/interpreting_queries.html :

Similar Words Match Google returns pages that match variants of your search terms.

The query [ child bicycle helmet ] finds pages that contain words that are similar to some or all of your search terms, e.g., “child,” “children,” or “children's,” “bicycle,” “bicycles,” “bicycle's,” “bicycling,” or “bicyclists,” and “helmet” or “helmets.” Google calls this feature word variations or automatic stemming. Stemming is a technique to search on the stem or root of a word that can have multiple endings.

If you only want to search for pages that contain some term(s) exactly, surround each such word or phrase with quotation marks (" "). See Quoted Phrases and Quotation Marks Replace the + Operator.

Google doesn't match variants when your query consists of a single term.

Note: When you want synonyms or variants that Google doesn't find, consider using either the OR or tilde operator.

Answer 2

You can do something to promote your results, and not just leave this to similarity search. Try to pass the variations as anchor text.

To do this, you must have only one page, with title the most common used/searched variation. Let's say that the most used/search variation is "Satya Harish Chandra"

In order to force Googlebot to index this page for other variations too, you can internal link this page and use as anchor text the variations you wish to promote. For example on other pages, eg your homepage, add a link:

<a href="/Satya Harish Chandra">Sathya Hareesh Chandhra</a>

or

<a href="/Satya Harish Chandra">Satia Haresi Xanntra</a>

This will promote your content when people searching for variations

But, do not use too many different variations, do not add too many links, and do not add more than 1 link on each page, for the same post. You will may be penalized for this. Use the first variation on home page, the second variation on movies list page etc.

Answer 3

I have a client who is searched for by many variations on their name (as revealed by analytics) and I am planning on implementing an 'AKA' (also known as) page.

I'm going to title it obviously, explain at the top of the page that we are aware people find them (or other companies with a similar name) using a variety of spellings and variations upon their name, and then list those variations.

Further, I'm going to explain "if you are looking for Company X, that provides service Y, you can find them here example.com."

By doing this, I'll create useful, user-centric content that uses all the variations of the keywords that I want to rank for and I expect it to rank favorably due to usefulness and exact matches without being spammy...also provides a good opportunity for outreach.