Glossary pages - keyword stuffing danger?

[alecfwilson]

I've put together a glossary of terms related to my industry that have SEO value and am planning on building out a section on our site with unique pages for each term. However, most of these terms have synonyms or are highly similar to other valuable terms. If I were to make a glossary, and on each page (that will have high-quality, valuable, and accurate definitions and more), wrote something like "{term}, also commonly referred to as {synonym}, {synonym}," would I run the risk of keyword stuffing penalties? My only other idea beyond creating a glossary with separate pages defining each synonym is to use schema.org markup to add synonyms to the HTML of the page, but that could be seen as even more grey-hat type keyword stuffing.

I guess one other option would be to work the synonyms into the definition so that the presence of the keyword reads more organically.

Thanks!

[Travis_Bailey]

I think you'll be alright just mentioning synonyms.

[EGOL]

I have a glossary on one of my websites.  It has been there about ten years and receives between 200 and 1000 visitors per day.  It ranks #1 for "[industry name] glossary", "[industry name] dictionary" and many similar terms and has held those rankings for many years.   It has about 1000 definitions, some that are very close or repeats as you describe.

When I made this glossary I decided to place it on 26 pages - one for each letter of the alphabet.  During the first few years it was up, I was tempted to convert it to one page per definition as you propose but decided against that.  I was tempted because I thought that the glossary would rank for lots of different keywords and pull traffic for all of them.

In the past two years, I have been really glad that I didn't create all of those pages.  Why?   Panda.   The Panda algo would probably not be kind to those pages.  They would contain an average of about 50 words.  That is too skimpy and I think that my site would be demoted for thin content.

What I have done is write substantive article pages for many of the definitions.  These are 500 to 2000 words with photos, graphs, data, etc.  Each of these article pages receives a link from the glossary definition and these page rank really well for very difficult terms.  I only have a couple hundred of these articles but finish one or two more every month - so its growing - slowly.

I have ignored the glossary for the past several years but this week I have been adding new words and adding images to many of the definitions where they would be helpful.   I am also adding links within the definitions to pages where I have articles about those topics.  The goal is go move glossary visitors into the rest of the site.

Two of my friends have glossaries.  One made his on 26 pages like mine and is getting lots of traffic.  The other made separate pages for every definition, was doing great in the early years, but recently had Panda problems.

Good luck with whatever you decide.