Glossary pages - keyword stuffing danger?
-
I've put together a glossary of terms related to my industry that have SEO value and am planning on building out a section on our site with unique pages for each term. However, most of these terms have synonyms or are highly similar to other valuable terms. If I were to make a glossary, and on each page (that will have high-quality, valuable, and accurate definitions and more), wrote something like "{term}, also commonly referred to as {synonym}, {synonym}," would I run the risk of keyword stuffing penalties? My only other idea beyond creating a glossary with separate pages defining each synonym is to use schema.org markup to add synonyms to the HTML of the page, but that could be seen as even more grey-hat type keyword stuffing.
I guess one other option would be to work the synonyms into the definition so that the presence of the keyword reads more organically.
Thanks!
-
I have a glossary on one of my websites. It has been there about ten years and receives between 200 and 1000 visitors per day. It ranks #1 for "[industry name] glossary", "[industry name] dictionary" and many similar terms and has held those rankings for many years. It has about 1000 definitions, some that are very close or repeats as you describe.
When I made this glossary I decided to place it on 26 pages - one for each letter of the alphabet. During the first few years it was up, I was tempted to convert it to one page per definition as you propose but decided against that. I was tempted because I thought that the glossary would rank for lots of different keywords and pull traffic for all of them.
In the past two years, I have been really glad that I didn't create all of those pages. Why? Panda. The Panda algo would probably not be kind to those pages. They would contain an average of about 50 words. That is too skimpy and I think that my site would be demoted for thin content.
What I have done is write substantive article pages for many of the definitions. These are 500 to 2000 words with photos, graphs, data, etc. Each of these article pages receives a link from the glossary definition and these page rank really well for very difficult terms. I only have a couple hundred of these articles but finish one or two more every month - so its growing - slowly.
I have ignored the glossary for the past several years but this week I have been adding new words and adding images to many of the definitions where they would be helpful. I am also adding links within the definitions to pages where I have articles about those topics. The goal is go move glossary visitors into the rest of the site.
Two of my friends have glossaries. One made his on 26 pages like mine and is getting lots of traffic. The other made separate pages for every definition, was doing great in the early years, but recently had Panda problems.
Good luck with whatever you decide.
-
I think you'll be alright just mentioning synonyms.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Third part http links on the page source: Social engineering content warning from Google
Hi, We have received "Social engineering content" warning from Google and one of our important page and it's internal pages have been flagged as "Deceptive site ahead". We wonder what's the reason behind this as Google didn't point exactly to the specific part of the page which made us look so to the Google. We don't employ any such content on the page and the content is same for many months. As our site is WP hosted, we used a WordPress plugin for this page's layout which injected 2 http (non-https) links in our page code. We suspect if this is the reason behind this? Any ideas? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz1 -
Confused how to make my post title from the following keywords
Hello i want to make a website of laptops repairing and want to target the following keywords in one post acer e55 lcd problem solution acer e55 lcd diagram acer e55 lcd ways acer e55 lcd jumper acer 355 lcd ic faultt the above keywords are just i posted an example so can you tell me how can I target them in one post haveing good title the one title in my mind is acer e55 lcd problem solution diagram jumper ways is this correct way of title or i have to do some thing else please help thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | salmansalmanpk0 -
Unique page URLs and SEO titles
www.heartwavemedia.com / Wordpress / All in One SEO pack I understand Google values unique titles and content but I'm unclear as to the difference between changing the page url slug and the seo title. For example: I have an about page with the url "www.heartwavemedia.com/about" and the SEO title San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | About I've noticed some of my competitors using url structures more like "www.competitor.com/san-francisco-video-production-about" Would it be wise to follow their lead? Will my landing page rank higher if each subsequent page uses similar keyword packed, long tail url? Or is that considered black hat? If advisable, would a url structure that includes "san-francisco-video-production-_____" be seen as being to similar even if it varies by one word at the end? Furthermore, will I be penalized for using similar SEO descriptions ie. "San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | Portfolio" and San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | Contact" or is the difference of one word "portfolio" and "contact" sufficient to read as unique? Finally...am I making any sense? Any and all thoughts appreciated...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | keeot0 -
From keyword rankings to ......... what KPI?
Hi Folks, I have a customer whos keyword rankings for Google have fluctuated rather widly over the past two months which has caused some consternation on their part dispite our reassurance. This is caused in large part due to their lack of understanding of SEO, little effort on their part in implementing changes for SEO and what I belive to be unrealistic expectations (having done no SEO work on their site wanting to see first page ranking for competitive keywords like 'heart attack' within 4-8 weeks). At the moment we are using just keyword rankings as a KPI and I wish to reframe them by using additional or alternative KPIs so that as rankings fluctuate with future Google seach algorithm tweaks and changes that the customer isn't solely focused on them. I am still in the process of formulating this list but so far I have decided to include the KPIs listed below. Month-on-Month / Quarter-On-Quarter Organic search traffic volume (should be rising) Top landing pages excluding branding keywords and homepage (should corelate to content created to target specific keywords) Number of landing pages on the client site that rank List of landing pages and bounce rates (are the 'gateway pages' holding visitors due to meeting their search requirements?) Average number of keywords per landing page (possibly integrated with the landig page reports above as a dimension to demonstrate correlation of # of keywords to landing pages) Some visibility on top keyword search terms (provided from Adwords where possible and GWT also) Top organic keywords (from adwords and GWT) Conversions from organic search (will vary from client to client for their own needs but will primarily be implemented using Google Tag Manager event tracking for things like enquiry forms etc) Referral traffic Delta/Ranking trends over large set of datapoints (will depend on how often you poll/track rankings but for example if you track rankings weekly then assess the trend of the rankings over 3-6months to smooth out the fluctuations) Your thoughts and feedback on this would be greatly appreciated. Regards, Dave
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icanseeu1 -
Sure, but what about non-keyword rich anchor text links?
Could spammy non-keyword rich anchor text liks help your website rank? Of course, there's been a lot of discussion around Google's update of its link scheme. Specifically, they target press releases with do-follow links on keyword-rich anchor text and "Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links". Well, that leaves the question unanswered, what if you're doing these spammy linking techniques, but on non-keyword rich anchor text, such as "click here", "find information", and "click here". Will you still get smacked down by Google then? Given that links on non-keyword anchor text can still help increase domain authority, it seems like Google left a door open here for large scale publication of a certain class of spammy links that can still assist rank, no? Also, in answering, please distinguish between best practice, and effective. For instance, purchasing links isn't a good practice, but it can still be an effective technique. While spammy links on non-keyword rich anchor text is certainly not a good practice, is it nonetheless effective?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ExploreConsulting0 -
How to Handle Sketchy Inbound Links to Forum Profile Pages
Hey Everyone, we recently discovered that one of our craft-related websites has a bunch of spam profiles with very sketchy backlink profiles. I just discovered this by looking at the Top Pages report in OpenSiteExplorer.org for our site, and noticed that a good chunk of our top pages are viagra/levitra/etc. type forum profile pages with loads of backlinks from sketchy websites (porn sites, sketchy link farms, etc.). So, some spambot has been building profiles on our site and then building backlinks to those profiles. Now, my question is...we can delete all these profiles, but how should we handle all of these sketchy inbound links? If all of the spam forum profile pages produce true 404 Error pages (when we delete them), will that evaporate the link equity? Or, could we still get penalized by Google? Do we need to use the Link Disavow tool? Also note that these forum profile pages have all been set to "noindex,nofollow" months ago. Not sure how that affects things. This is going to be a time waster for me, but I want to ensure that we don't get penalized. Thanks for your advice!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
What Google considers to be a branded keyword?
We can set our own keywords as branded in SeoMoz campaign, but Google would not necessarily see them like branded. After reading the Blog post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update I had a question: Are there known rules (or at least guesses) what Google considers a branded keyword/anchor text? I guess the first one would be your website domain. So bluewidget.com for example would be a branded keyword for bluewidget.com website. How about Blue Widget or Blue Widget Company?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SirMax0