301 Redirect to add juice from Keyword A to Keyword B

[CEDRSolutions]

Here's our situation:

Our company sells Employee HANDBOOKS (the book that explains to employees how the company itself is run, more or less).  That's the technically correct term for them.  However, many people use this term interchangeably with Employee MANUALS.  Employee MANUALS are actually slightly different.  (they're more specific, usually a list of common office policies and procedures and how to do them)

When doing Keyword research, we learned that many, many people search for Employee MANUALS when they actually are interested in an employee HANDBOOK.  We've got our page optimized for the Keyword Employee HANDBOOKS, because in our copy we always refer to it as such.

Here's my question:  Would it be "cloacking" or some other blackhat nonsense if we did this:

#1.  Take a copy of the current page, and make a second page for it with a slightly different URL, but optimize the SEO-relevant parts for the phrase Employee MANUAL.

#2.  That page will also include a 301-redirect towards the original page, which is identical except the SEO bits are optimized for Employee HANDBOOKS.

My understanding here is that we'd get the SEO juice from the phrase Employee Manual, without actually having to do the upkeep on two different pages. We also avoid having to have a random page SEO optimized for an improper term just because of the general confusion about what the product is called.

Are we on the right track here?  Or is this going to annoy Google, or not have the result I'm predicting?  Any insight is appreciated!

[RyanPurkey]

Exactly this. Thanks Richard for explaining it in this way as well.

[TheeDigital]

It looks like Google is aware of and has made this connection already. If you Google "employee manual" you will see that it actually bolds the term "handbook" as well. This usually indicates they can be used almost interchangeably in the content.

[RyanPurkey]

I would create the 301 redirect for the old pages to the most applicable new pages or home page, and create a custom 404. Those are always good to have and could also help explain the transition to your current strategy.

[CEDRSolutions]

Fantastic, thank you sir.  I've marked the question as answered and really appreciate your quick response.  Could I trouble you for one more thing?

We'd already researched this, but since I may have failed to catch something important I want to make sure I'm not setting up a bad result.

We're currently migrating from one web design to another.  It's all in WordPress but it's a new theme, templates, and all of that.

We have several links to content that is no longer particularly relevant or aligning with our current strategy.  At first we felt it would be better to just not move them over, and design a friendly but generic 404 page that would alert people they may have tried to access something that's no longer there.

I suggested that instead of 404 (which I feel look bad, no matter how well they're designed) we should just transfer over the web page, but have them 301-redirect to our home page. I think that will be a slightly less jarring experience for them than seeing a 404 page.  Either way, it will be a very small number of people who might still have access to a link for content so old/bad we don't really want it on our site anymore.

So in your opinion, is 404ing out or 301ing back to the home page the better option in our scenario?  Or perhaps some third option I'm unaware of.

[RyanPurkey]

Right. Even though your business is technically about handbooks, doesn't mean you can't create some sort of campaign or widget or app or some sort of engagement piece that uses the term 'manual' instead and is targeted at individuals instead of corporate users.

You'll notice when you run some Google searches that they'll tag a result with synonyms as well as results missing certain precise search terms. This is due to the ability of Google to correlate meaning, intent, links, and more to such a high degree. The more you engage the higher you'll rank for both handbook and manual.

[CEDRSolutions]

I'm not sure I followed your suggestion for an alternative, but thanks for your quick answer.

You're suggesting we simply try to obtain links to our site with anchor text mentioning both manuals and handbooks?  I understand SEO value for the words in the anchor text will transfer that juice to the site it links to, but we are still in the process of building awareness, so a lot of our links back to our site are actually made by us. (When we submit content to various sites for them to post, we have the link to our site in the Author Bio section.  When we post on social media, we're usually forced to use a bit.ly link due to Twitter character constraints.)

So if we advertise a "Free Handbook Review" program, we'd want to have SOME of the links back to our site have "manual" somewhere in the anchor text, in other words.

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Paul. Yes, this bit of work would be more gray/black than other straightforward methods, plus its benefits would be pretty minimal. What would be better is gaining links that use the terms interchangeably from outside sources. If people are searching for these terms as synonyms they will likely link in the same way. There would be several ways to go about this, like a "Make Your Manual" campaign that generates some links, PR around such, and so on. Cheers.