Internal Linking

[bretlawson]

I sometimes create different pages on my site to target similar keywords, ie: "digitizer part", "digitizer parts". The pages are very similar. One page has a main link from every page that is visible to the visitor. I have placed a very small link for the other page/s on every page to be sure that they are crawled and indexed.

Two questions:

1. Is this spam, will Google penalize me if they see it/
2. Am i going about this the wrong way, is there another method for this?

[cbp]

If the link is there for the search engine crawler and not the visitor, then its spam.

CBP

[flood6]

Yeah, creating nearly identical pages using only slightly different keywords is right on the line with what might get you into trouble with the SEs.

If the links to the similar pages are small enough that a visitor won't likely see them, then you may be looking at getting penalized for that if caught.

Additionally if the "twin pages" are similar enough to the originals, Google may see it as duplicate content and just completely disregard one of each pair. How similar two pages have to be to be considered "duplicate content" by Google isn't really clear.

[rescom]

My reccomendation would be for you to make each page slightly different in addition to the modified keywords. Ad a little additional information, change wording a bit, maybe even change a few pictures.

This will help in these not being considered spam and will also give you a good idea of what works, and what doesn't.

Even changing an image name can effect SE, maybe for the good, maybe not, but you will soon find out.