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I'm building a website where each piece of content can have multiple different title/body phrasings which got the same meaning, and each phrasing got its own page (with links connecting to its content group).

Is there a way to sum up all of the pages SEO rank while maintaining each page its own unique phrasing for easy search engine discover-ability?

A very simplistic ex. to illustrate what I mean:

Page 1 title: I feel drowsy

Page 2 title: I feel dozy

Page 3 title: I am feeling tired

Page 4 title: What I feel now is being exhausted

Basically all those titles mean the same thing but just phrased differently, and I want users to be able to find them with each of the words titled above.

So I thought of doing the following: 1 page is the representative page with HTTP status 200 and the rest have HTTP status code of 302 to page 1.

What I wonder though is:

  1. Do I even tie up the pages rank like that or just give all of it to page 1?
  2. Will such a solution actually show the results of pages 2 to 4 at the search engines results for fitting searches?
  3. If I want to change the representative to page 2, is it OK to change its status to 200 and page 1 status to 302 (this action can happen many times during the site life)?
  4. Is it even allowed to have 302 for very long periods of times? (can be permanent in a way)
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  • If you are targeting keywords, stop! You are seriously misguided on how search works. Search engines do not match search terms to pages. The fact that the SEO community pushes this is utterly ridiculous! This is especially important considering Googles own research paper written by Brin and Page states that term matching search engines give poor results and use of semantics and trust models are why Google is superior.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jun 23, 2018 at 15:17
  • @closetnoc Well I don't think that I do it (I understand that my example basically gave dictionary differences and that it over simplified), the issue is that my system is basically built from lots of small pieces of info which are set in lots of tree hierarchies, those pieces of contents are very short (they have to be... really not trying to fool the search engines..) but may have multiple phrasings.. how can I use that property to help the search engines understand my site?
    – Nimrod Yonatan Ben-Nes
    Commented Jun 23, 2018 at 21:05
  • @closetnoc btw I checked Brin and Page research paper (it feel a little sacred doesn't it? ;)) and they actually said in it "PageRank is an excellent way to prioritize the results of web keyword searches." so they do match keywords for fitness (at least used to) and then prioritize using PageRank, but maybe I misunderstood and anyway they made it a little more complex since then ;)
    – Nimrod Yonatan Ben-Nes
    Commented Jun 23, 2018 at 21:09
  • Both Google and Bing are smart enough to know that Rubbish and Trash mean the same thing however dozy, drowsy, tiredness and exhaustion have all different meanings and it would be stupid to target them all. Dozy is a lite saying to say someone is ready for bed. Drowsy is most often associated with the side effects of drugs, tiredness and exhaustion are more associated with over-working, flu's, diseases or general lifestyle choices.
    – Simon Hayter
    Commented Jun 23, 2018 at 22:24
  • Your keyword choices should always be ones that are natural and makes a good read. Using keywords in this manner lowers user experience and in turn, people are most likely to leave or not link to your content. People linking and talking about your content is the bread and butter of rankings, people don't link to rubbish, or at least the majority of people don't.
    – Simon Hayter
    Commented Jun 23, 2018 at 22:34

1 Answer 1

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302 redirects might combine all the PageRank but 301 permanent redirects certainly would. I would suggest using 301 permanent redirects instead. Other than SEO, the biggest difference between 301 and 302 redirects is how they get cached by browsers. Permanent redirects get much more aggressively cached. As long as you don't expect the page to change during a users browsing session, that is permanent enough to use 301 redirects.

If you redirect the pages, Google won't be able to see the alternate titles anymore. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. As others have pointed out in the comments, using alternate phrasings doesn't help SEO much anymore. If the phrases are awkward, it can actually hurt. Using titles that exactly match search phrases was a good SEO strategy 7 years ago, but Google has since changed so much that the technique doesn't work now.

If your pages have the same content except for alternate titles, Google isn't likely to index all the variants anyway. Google is very good about detecting substantially duplicate pages. When Google finds such duplication it usually just chooses one of them to index and ignores the others. See: What is duplicate content and how can I avoid being penalized for it on my site? Redirecting to one is a good SEO strategy because it can get benefit from the links to pages that wouldn't be indexed.

It is OK to later change your titles and redirect to a different page. There may be a temporary drop in rankings when you do so, but it shouldn't last more than a few weeks.

You are allowed to use 302 redirects for long periods of time. Many sites do so. 302 redirects are often the default redirect type for many web servers. However, as I said before, I suggest that you 301 redirects to get any SEO benefits.

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  • Well with the new info I got from u, closetnoc & Simon Hayter (they wrote comments to my question) I think I'll just go at the end on 1 page per content "group" which would be able to get associated to multiple phrases which won't get their own pages (system requirement). So there is no need to do redirects at all, except when the "selected title phrasing" will be edited, then I'll do 301 just like this site does :) Cheers and thx! :)
    – Nimrod Yonatan Ben-Nes
    Commented Jun 25, 2018 at 9:19

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