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SEO with similar pages

Our company has created a "comparison" tool that uses unique urls to choose who you want to compare, example:

http://www.sportingcharts.com/nhl/2010-edmonton-oilers/vs/2008-calgary-flames/ http://www.sportingcharts.com/nhl/1993-carolina-hurricanes/vs/2008-dallas-stars/

Does anyone know if this is a recommended SEO strategy or is it better to use query string parameters instead of completely different urls. One advantage I was thinking of is this could grab long tail traffic searches such as "2010 Edmonton Oilers Vs 1995 Calgary Flames" but having this many URLS might also hurt the general SEO of these pages.

Does anyone have any experience in creating pages like this? What is the recommended strategy?

Solution

  • The style of URL is not going to matter much to search engines.

    From a search engine perspective they are going to care more that:

    • You have 30 teams and 24 seasons. You are creating 30*24*30*24 = over 500,000 pages.
    • Each page has very little content. Its just two team names and some numerical stats.
    • The content that you do have is heavily duplicated across pages.
    • The search volume for your targeted keywords is going to be very low. Very few people search for two team names with two different years.

    If I ran a search engine, I would not want to have my crawlers waste time crawling that site. I wouldn't want the pages in the index.

    I expect that your site will suffer from "thin content", "duplicate content", and "excessive pages" issues because of this section.