Combining two pages into one
-
I've got two pages I'd like to combine into one.
These two URLs: widgets.com/about_us.php & widgets.com/contact_us.php
would become: widgets.com/about-us
Two questions...
1. Is it okay to combine the content into one page and setup 301 redirects for both pages (without losing page rank)?
2. Do I keep the original pages in my sitemap.xml file or just take them out after I setup the redirect?
Thanks in advance!
-
First, I've done a lot of full site 301's - meaning all pages on the site to new domain pages, not domain to domain - and never lost 10% (usually 1%). Second, the answer was based on how you wrote the question. You could simply redesign one page (one with less PR, PA, etc. would be suggestion) and redirect it to the other. Just do not change anything in that url.
Hope it helps,
Robert
-
Just to understand this better. If using a 301 redirect loses 1-10% of the link juice, wouldn't it be better to use the same url for one of them and redirect the other?
-
Hello SEO Hunter
Just making sure you are creating a new page and both 301 to that as opposed to 301 one to the other for each? So your new page would be widgets.com/about-contacting-us and you would 301 from the two current to the new page. If so, that is great.
I agree with Marisa otherwise.
-
Yes, it's fine and a good thing to do that.
-
This is the best way to do it to preserve your rankings. There's never a guarantee, but doing it this way is your best bet.
-
Once you've combined them into one, take the old page out of your sitemap.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What is the benefit of directory pages?
I recently started at a new job running ecommerce websites. We sell yoga equipment and on 2 of our sites we built directory pages for yoga studios to list their calendars and whatnot. They are pretty old and out of date, but my question is, is there any benefit to these types of directories? If they do, we need to look at refreshing them. But if not, then they need to go. One of them is here. http://www.everythingyoga.com/studios.aspx Like I said, it is out of date.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShockoeCommerce0 -
How should I deal with this page?
Hey Mozzers, I was looking for a little guidance and advice regarding a couple of pages on my website. I have used 'shoes' for this example. I have the current structure Parent Category - Shoes Sub Categories - Blue Shoes
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
Hard Shoes
Soft Shoes
Big Shoes etc Supporting Article - Different Types of Shoe and Their Uses There are about 12 subcategories in total - each one links back to the Parent Category with the keyword "Shoes". Every sub category has gone from ranking 50+ to 10-30th for its main keyword which is a good start and as I release supporting articles im sure each one will climb. I am happy with this. The Article ranks no1 for about 20 longtails terms around "different shoes". This page attracts around 60% of my websites traffic but we know this traffic will not convert as most are people and children looking for information only for educational purposes and are not looking to buy. Many are also looking for a type of product we dont sell. My issue is ranking for the primary category "Shoes" keyword. When i first made the changes we went from ranking nowhere to around 28th on the parent category page targeted at "Shoes". Whilst not fantastic this was good as gave us something to work off. However a few weeks later, the article page ranked 40th for this term and the main page dropped off the scale. Then another week some of the sub category pages ranked for it. And now none of my pages rank in the top 50 for it. I am fairly sure this is due to some cannibalisation - simply because of various pages ranking for it at different times.
I also think that additional content added by products on the sub category pages is giving them more content and making them rank better. The Page Itself
The Shoes page itself contains 400 good unique words, with the keyword mentioned 8 times including headings. There is an image at the top of the page with its title and alt text targeted towards the keyword. The 12 sub categories are linked to on the left navigation bar, and then again below the 400 words of content via a picture and text link. This added the keyword to the page another 18 or so times in the form of links to longtail subcaterogies. This could introduce a spam problem i guess but its in the form of nav bars or navigation tables and i understood this to be a necessary evil on eCommerce websites. There are no actual products linked from this page. - a problem? With all the basic SEO covered. All sub pages linking back to the parent category, the only solution I can think of is to add more content by Adding all shoes products to the shoe page as it currently only links out the the sub categories Merging the "Different Type of Shoe and Their Uses" article into the shoe page to make a super page and make the article pages less like to produce cannibalistic problems. However, by doing solution 2, I remove a page bringing in a lot of traffic. The traffic it brings in however is of very little use and inflates the bounce rate and lowers the conversion rate of my whole site by significant figures. It also distorts other useful reports to track my other progress. I hope i have explained well enough, thanks for sticking with me this far, i havn't posted links due to a reluctance by the company so hopefully my example will suffice. As always thanks for any input.0 -
Pages Disappearing from Search
Hi, We have had a strongly ranking site since 2004. Over the past couple of days, our Google traffic has dropped by around 20% and some of our strong pages are completely disappearing from the rankings. They are still indexed, but having ranked number 1 are nowhere to be found. A number of pages still remain intact, but it seems they are increasingly disappearing. Where should we start to try and find out what is happening? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
What can you do when Google can't decide which of two pages is the better search result
On one of our primary keywords Google is swapping out (about every other week) returning our home page, which is more transactional, with a deeper more information based page. So if you look at the Analysis in Moz you get an almost double helix like graph of those pages repeatedly swapping places. So there seems to be a bit of cannibalizing happening that I don't know how to correct. I think part of the problem is the deeper page would ideally be "longer" tail searches that contain the one word keyword that is having this bouncing problem as a part of the longer phrase. What can be done to try prevent this from happening? Can internal links help? I tried adding a link on that term to the deeper page to our homepage, and in a knee jerk reaction was asked to pull that link before I think there was really any evidence to suggest that that one new link made a positive or negative effect. There are some crazy theories floating around at the moment, but I am curious what others think both about if adding a link from a informational to a transactional page could in fact have a negative effect, and what else could be done/tried to help clarify the difference between the two pages for the search engines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plumvoice0 -
Will Creating a Keyword specific Page to replace the Category Section page cause any harm to my website?
I am running a word press install for my blog and recently had 3 of my main keywords set as categories. I recently decided to create a static page for the keywords instead of having the category page showing all the posts within the category, and took it off the navigation bar. I read about setting the categories to use NO index so the search engines can shine more importance on the new pages i created to really replace where the category was showing. Can this have a negative effect on my rankings? http://junkcarsforcashnjcompany.com junk car removal nj is showing the category section, So i placed the no index on it. Will the search engines refresh the data and replace it with the new page I created?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars0 -
Google + Local Pages
Hi, If I have a company with multipul addresses, Do I create separate Google + page for each area?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
List of Off page techniques
Hello Everyone, Please share the list of off page techniques to improve ranking and which techniques completely avoided?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
Duplicate page Content
There has been over 300 pages on our clients site with duplicate page content. Before we embark on a programming solution to this with canonical tags, our developers are requesting the list of originating sites/links/sources for these odd URLs. How can we find a list of the originating URLs? If you we can provide a list of originating sources, that would be helpful. For example, our the following pages are showing (as a sample) as duplicate content: www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=11 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=12 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=15 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=2 "How did you get all those duplicate urls? I have tried to google the "contact us", "news", "video" pages. I didn't get all those duplicate pages. The page id=87 on the most of the duplicate pages are not supposed to be there. I was wondering how the visitors got to all those duplicate pages. Please advise." Note, the CMS does not create this type of hybrid URLs. We are as curious as you as to where/why/how these are being created. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dlemieux0