Hey folks, have searched around and haven't been able to find an answer to this question.
I've got a client who has very different search results when including his middle initial. His bio page on his company's website has the slug /people/john-smith; I'm wondering if we set up a duplicate bio page with his middle initial (e.g. /people/john-b-smith) and then 301 redirect it to the existent bio page, whether the latter page would get indexed by google and show in search results for queries that use the middle initial (e.g. "john b smith").
I've already got the metadata based on the middle initial version but I know the slug is a ranking signal and since it's a direct match to one of his higher volume branded queries I thought it might help to get his bio page ranking more highly.
Would that work or does the 301'd page effectively cease to exist in Google's eyes?
