Is it considered spammy to have multiple pages on the same site optimized for the same keyword?

[406lucy]

Is it OK to keyword-optimize multiple pages for the same keyword? Is it beneficial, hurtful, or not a major factor either way?

[406lucy]

Alice - thank you very much for this thoughtful & detailed input! I will put it to use.

[406lucy]

Alice - thank you very much for this thoughtful & detailed input! I will put it to use.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

In short, it's not best practices to optimize multiple pages for the same keyword. It's called "keyword cannibalisation" and it's a very old issue in SEO.

Rand wrote this post in 2007, and it's still relevant today!
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

Since this time, the Panda update began to penalize site that contained many similar pages targeting the same or similar keywords. Examples include pages like:

• Best Plumber Atlanta
• Best Plumber Atlanta Suburb
• Best Plumber Downtown Atlanta
• Best plumber Atlanta Georgia

In general, if you take these pages and make sure they target different topics, you're likely to see your rankings and traffic rise.

[gcdtechnologies]

Optimising multiple pages for the same keyword can be detrimental. This can lead to "keyword cannibalisation", where pages are forced to compete with each other for the same query. This can result in lower overall rankings.

Ideally each page should be optimised for a different keyword - e.g. your homepage could be optimised for "leather shoes" and your category pages could be optimised for "men's leather shoes", "women's leather shoes", "kid's leather shoes" etc,

Having one page for each topic/keyword and making it as useful and comprehensive as possible will attract more links than having three or four different pages about the same topic.

If you're worried about keyword cannibalisation you can use internal anchor text to indicate which page should be considered the authority for that keyword - e.g. your "men's leather shoes" page could have the anchor "leather shoes" that directs back to the home page.

[bronxpad]

In my opinion and understanding it is actually not a bad idea to have multiple pages optimized for the same keyword. It is often used for Reputation Management, first page dominance and other reasons. YOur Primamry goal should first be to get your main page ranked as high as possible. Then once you maximize your efforts there then you can consider multiple pages on page 1.

My experience as a Realtor who just recently started learning more about seo has shown me that major sites use this tactic to push down their competitors and dominate page 1 which I'm assuming is your goal. Ex: Zillow, Trulia, Homes and Realtor all use this tactic to drive down the local Sites like mines. Fortunately I've learned enough to counter their efforts and am on page one for almost all my main keywords.

There are some basic SEO rules to follow though.

• Use White Hat Techniques
• Don't buy links for this or any purpose
• Make Sure each page has unique content and not duplicate content.

You might also want to use Vertical Search for this tactic. Meaning YouTube Videos which can rank high, Images, News Articles that you can post as a free lancer for a local paper.

I hope this helps and good luck.