Double Listing

[EGOL]

If a site is making good money, clearly the right choice is to hire a SEO.

I agree.

I recognize your concerns are legitimate, but have you ever heard of that happening this year on SEOmoz?

No, not this year on SEOmoz.  But I know for a fact that forum posts sometimes attract very strong competitors and very aggressive scrapers.  And, I know for a fact how badly your income can be damaged.

[RyanKent]

Very good point. I often find SEOmoz Q&A results on the first page of Google SERPs.

[destdigi]

another factor that we need to be aware is "the competitiveness" of the keyword.  In a low competitive market, this has workd for me, but at higher, needs some good quality external links coming in.

cheers!

[NickEubanks]

There are a lot of great responses here.

I personally am a huge proponent of architecture (IA), between both URL's and content. If you construct your site the right way you should be able (to EGOL's point) to rank highly for your individual product terms and then have additional results listed underneath such as your homepage and potentially a news or archive page.

For example lets say you sell brass, silver, and gold widgets. You would want to set the site up so you have a trickle down hierarchy with implied relevance, i.e. homepage/product-category/product-name. This will allow you to build authority at all three directory levels and rank your category landing or product detail pages for your product queries as well as your homepage further down the results.

[Joe.Robison]

I agree with EGOL's answer - right on.

I was trained in theory in my early days that you should NEVER have two pages targeting the same keyword, similar to Ryan's first answer about Google getting "confused" about both pages and ranking neither. I've now seen in practice over the years that this isn't true and that double listings from the 1&2 or even 2-4 positions are very possible, especially for "chunky middle" and long-tail terms.

Similar to how Rand and many others have been saying over the years, you do want to create the perfectly optimized page for your main keywords, fully of great content, rich media, focused CTA's, etc. But there is also a natural use of certain keywords throughout your site that occurs. There are similar but not exact pages that just happen to target the same keywords - and these often create the double listings. So following the advice from others above, what I've seen work well for double listings is to choose a primary keyword for each of your main pages, but don't worry about overlapping certain keywords among your pages - this happens naturally and you can get double listings as a result.