Hi there, EasyDev:
I don't think your questions are stupid, and I am quite sure that goodroi and tedster don't think they are stupid, either. Plus I think they, as well as I, very much welcome questions of the type you are asking. If they didn't, I don't think they would have bothered to answer them at all. Neither of them seems like the type of person who enjoys belittling the opinion of others.
My opinion - which is very much based on the thoughts espressed in this forum by tedster, goodroi, Robert Charlton, and other moderators, as well as based on my own experience - is that trying to target every synonym is a GOOD idea for Adwords, but can be very dangerous for SEO.
And, it seems more apparent now than ever that what advice google's Adsense team might give can contradict the advice that google's spam team gives, and vice versa.
While no one knows for sure, there are a lot of people who have expressed the idea that Panda was designed to devalue sites that had many pages that were covering very closely related synonyms.
In fact, for those who claim to have recovered from Panda, many claim their recovery was due to REDUCING the number of similar pages (others claim to have escaped Panda by moving their content to a new sub-domain or a new domain altogether).
It is probably a good idea to look at those sites that were nailed by the various versions of Panda (mahalo, ehow, etc.,) and try and see whether or not the structure of your new site will closely resemble the structure of sites that were struck by Panda.
As for tedster's comment, with which you seem to have some concern:
Build an online business - then your question evaporates.
I am going to go out on a limb here with comments tedster has posted in the past, as well as with my own experience and observations of the search results lately, to try and interpret what he is saying:
It is much harder nowadays to gain good rankings by simply creating significant amounts of similar content that uses traditional on-page SEO methods of targeting keywords.
Conversely, websites that create a unique value for visitors, which thus leads to higher amounts of social interaction, appear to benefit significantly from that social interaction.
(I apologize tedster if I have misinterpreted your statement.)
Some of that social interaction could be:
- people posting links to the site
- people face book "liking" the site
- people tweeting the site's URL / name
- people typing the URL into the google search box
- large media organizations mentioning the site
- well respected authority sites referencing the site)
Some people theorize that google even tracks the email opening rate of sites that send out newsletters and uses that as part of their search ranking algorithm.
One final note, EasyDev:
To a certain extent, we are all just guessing here - although some people's guesses are worth more than others. The only way you will know for certain is by experimenting. If you are going to build a web site which is not expected to have a lot of the social interaction that I mentioned above, then it may be you will need to build several sites, with different structures, and see which one works best.
