Hundreds of very similar pages, but that make sense for the user. SEO damage?

Question

On my website, from a user point of view, it makes sense to have these pages:

• https://www.example.com/is-730-a-good-score
• https://www.example.com/is-731-a-good-score
• https://www.example.com/is-732-a-good-score
• And hundreds more of these...

The content for lots of these pages will be very similar (dynamically generated), with small differences, like the number itself on the title, etc. Let's say 90% will be duplicated.

My audience usually googles it just like that: "is 730 a good score?". That's why I'm considering this approach.

Two questions:

1. If I do as described above, will it damage my SEO? Im specifically concerned about Google.
2. If that's not a good idea, how would you do it?

------UPDATE----------

This website does something very similar to what I`m considering:

https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education/score-basics/429-credit-score/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education/score-basics/430-credit-score/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education/score-basics/431-credit-score/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education/score-basics/451-credit-score/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education/score-basics/452-credit-score/

Based on google results for "is 452 a good credit score?", it seems to be working for them.

Answer 1

You are right to be worried. You are creating what Google calls doorway pages. Doorway pages are against the Google webmaster guidelines. Creating doorway pages can get your entire site penalized from ranking in the Google search results.

These would be considered doorway pages because:

• They are pages whose only purpose is to rank highly for specific search queries.
• There are hundreds of 90% similar pages that would all look nearly identical in search results.
• You plan to implement them as orphan landing pages on your site with no clearly defined, browseable hierarchy linking to them.

To rank in Google for these phrases you need to:

• Craft fewer pages that are each designed to rank for multiple queries.
• Make sure pages that you create are substantially different from each other.
• Provide a usable way to navigate to each page from other pages on your site.

If you find other sites for which a doorway pages strategy is working, they just haven't been caught yet. If you implement doorway pages you may get some search engine traffic from them, but Google could crack down at any point. Google could even write a new algorithm to detect these doorway pages and all the sites that are using them could get penalized at once.