Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Merging Pages and SEO
-
Hi,
We are redesigning our website the following way:
Before: Page A with Content A, Page B with Content B, Page C with Content C, etc
e.g. one page for each Customer Returns, Overstocks, Master Case, etc
Now: Page D with content A + B + C etc.
e.g. one long page containing all Product Conditions, one after the otherSo we are merging multiples pages into one.
What is the best way to do so, so we don't lose traffic? (or we lose the minimum possible)e.g. should we 301 Redirect A/B/C to D...?
Is it likely that we lose significant traffic with this change?Thank you,
-
It's hard to say how much traffic you'll lose from the merge. Like Logan said, you'll definitely lose a bit when you first move, but long term, you'll need to look at your competition to figure out if it's better to keep the pages separate or combine them.
I don't recommend keeping pages A, B, and C if you're going to hide them from the main structure of your site. Pages get most of their Page Authority from internal links (unless they're link bait), so they won't be able to rank anyway.
That said, here's how I'd estimate the loss of traffic from the move:
- Use Google Search Console to determine the primary keyword/s for page A, B, and C
- Use a tool like Open Site Explorer to determine the number of links A, B, and C have. (Bonus: look at the websites linking to A, B, or C. If those are resource pages, there's a good chance their webmaster will update their links to page D, which will help with the traffic dip. If they're from news articles, you'll probably have to rely on 301s.)
- Search for each of those top keywords and look at your competition. Does the competition closely target the term? Will page D seem as relevant to the keyword as A, B, or C did?
- Now, look at the Page Authorities of the competition for each keyword. Will page D, which will have a combo of links from A, B, and C, blow your competition out of the water? About match it? Still be a bit behind?
- Here's the part that's really tough: for each keyword, estimate where page D would rank, given how well it targets the keyword and how many inbound links it has.
- Estimate the % increase or drop in traffic based on adjusted click through rate. You can find this by playing around in Google Search Console to find a time when your site ranked in a different position, or by using average click through rates, like here.
- Once you're done, put together your estimated percent increases or drops in traffic to estimate how the new page will perform. (I recommend you look at a percent change because adding up totals only for top keywords won't take long tail keywords into account, and you'll almost definitely come up with a much lower count than you're currently getting.)
Not the easiest process in the world, and your estimate will almost definitely be wrong, since you make a lot of assumptions along the way. But it should give you an idea of whether you'll eventually gain or lose traffic from the move, once that initial Googlebot confusion wears off.
Hope this makes sense! Let me know if you have any questions!
Kristina
-
Thank you Logan and Kristina,
What would you recommend for the pages with high traffic - just leaving them separate as they used to be?
Let's say for example I have the following numbers:
- Page A: 20,000 visits/month
- Page B: 10,000 visits/month
- Page
5,000 visits/month
After joining them in Page D - how much is it going to lose? Is Page D more likely to have 31,500 visits/month (-10% compared to previous Page A+B+C), or would it have more like 20-25,000?
Also - would you recommend keeping Page A/B/C separate so they are more targeted but not accessible from frontend (to avoid losing much traffic), then only link from frontend Page D with a different URL?
(and could this have duplicate issues though...?)Cheers,
-
Hi,
Anytime a site redesign occurs, you're going to lose traffic. 301 redirects are going to be your best bet to minimize the traffic loss when you flip the switch. Where you're most likely to take a hit is from organic though, depending on what kind of content condensing you're doing, you might lose out on a lot of rankings. I would dig into Google Analytics and Search Console and see how valuable those pages are in terms of organic traffic before deciding to condense. There are definitely some good cases for this, but there's also a lot of instances where I wouldn't recommend combining 3 pages into 1.
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
-
Should I optimize the login page? Will it affect the website SEO ranking?
I'm trying to resolve the site crawl issues that we have on our website. One of the links that has different issue types together is our login page. Currently we have two login pages that have the same content but different sub domains. **However I'm wondering if optimizing SEO on our login pages affects our website SEO ranking and if it's something better to do or not. ** To point out the details of the issues, the issue types that the logins pages have are "duplicate title", "duplicate content", "missing H1", "missing description", "thin content", "missing canonical tag" I'd appreciate your help, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kaylie0 -
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
Few pages without SSL
Hi, A website is not fully secured with a SSL certificate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
Approx 97% of the pages on the website are secured. A few pages are unfortunately not secured with a SSL certificate, because otherwise some functions on those pages do not work. It's a website where you can play online games. These games do not work with an SSL connection. Is there anything we have to consider or optimize?
Because, for example when we click on the secure lock icon in the browser, the following notice.
Your connection to this site is not fully secured Can this harm the Google ranking? Regards,
Tom1 -
Category Page as Shopping Aggregator Page
Hi, I have been reviewing the info from Google on structured data for products and started to ponder.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexcox6
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products Here is the scenario.
You have a Category Page and it lists 8 products, each products shows an image, price and review rating. As the individual products pages are already marked up they display Rich Snippets in the serps.
I wonder how do we get the rich snippets for the category page. Now Google suggest a markup for shopping aggregator pages that lists a single product, along with information about different sellers offering that product but nothing for categories. My ponder is this, Can we use the shopping aggregator markup for category pages to achieve the coveted rich results (from and to price, average reviews)? Keen to hear from anyone who has had any thoughts on the matter or had already tried this.0 -
CDN for SEO (or not)?
Does CDN impact on SEO or not? There seems conflicting ideas as to whether they impact positively or negatively, I realise that if the page loads quicker this is a good thing for SEO and usability of course. Does Google see CDN as just cheating and a get-around for not doing the work from the ground up and using good hosting etc? Do you have any direct experience? All constructive input much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Is .ME domain is effective in SEO ?
I am always listening about TLD. com. org .net but what about the .me domain. Can this will be effective in SEO. Can i able to beat down my competitors, if i choose .me . I also have a .com or other TLD option but if i am making my name than .me is for me but i need your suggestion for the seo purpose. Is there really domain affective in term of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pnb5670 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0