Two steps have pages with similar titles which gives a warning from Yoast SEO

Question

my custom product designer web application is in the following page of my site: www.example.com/designyourself

This page can show different designable product based on Query String, example:

• www.example.com/designyourself?product=sweatshirt
• www.example.com/designyourself?product=tshirt

I have created the following pages to rank in google as catalog pages for users to choose a product and the navigate to app:

1. www.example.com/designtshirt
2. www.example.com/designsweatshirt

The problem arises here. For example (1) page consists of 4 different t-shirt images, and 4 links below the images as below:

• <a href="https://www.example.com/designyourself/?product=tshirt">Design Tshirt</a>
• <a href="https://www.example.com/designyourself/?product=womantshirt">Design Woman TShirt</a>
• <a href="https://www.example.com/designyourself/?product=oversizetshirt">Design Oversize Tshirt</a>
• <a href="https://www.example.com/designyourself/?product=childtshirt">Design Child Tshirt</a>

Yoast SEO plugin of WordPress warns me about the problem:

Link keyphrase: You're linking to another page (/designyourself/?product=tshirt) with the words you want this page to rank (Design Tshirt) for. Don't do that!

Okay, I understand that, but both my pages are related to designing the t-shirt. 1 is showing users to choose which t-shirt they want to design, and the other one opens the application with t-shirt product selected. I am not sure what to do to solve this problem.

Answer 1

When you have two such pages with similarities but different purpose, you can usually find different keywords for the two pages. Your second step is trying to narrow down the type of t-shirt, so I'd recommend finding a more specific phrase. Maybe one of:

• Regular t-shirt
• Men's t-shirt
• Unisex t-shirt
• Crew neck t-shirt

I'm also not sure why you are using the word "design" in two of the four links. "Design" could apply to all four of those links. Rather than use it in the anchor text of each of them, you should use it in a question or heading. I'd think it would be clearer if you phrased it as:

What type of t-shirt would you like to design?

• Men's t-shirt
• Woman's t-shirt
• Oversize t-shirt
• Child's t-shirt

That way, the first page of your flow would be targeted at "Design t-shirt" and the second page of you flow would be targeted at the more specific "Men's t-shirt."

For what it is worth, Yoast is being overly pedantic. The anchor text that you use internally on your site to your own pages doesn't make much of a difference for SEO these days. Eight years ago Google gave a lot more weight to it. That rule in Yoast is likely left over from the days when that anchor text could have mattered.

It is a useful exercise to think carefully about each page's keyword targeting, but it isn't an "SEO error" to use the same anchor text internally point to two different pages. I'd fix this on your site mostly because I think it would be confusing for users to have to click on "Design t-shirt" twice to get to the correct type of shirt they want.