Turning Three Pages Into One

When three pages are one page

A site accumulates near-duplicates without anybody deciding to create them.

Somebody writes a service page, then a blog post about the same subject, then a page targeting a slightly different phrase for the same thing.

Each is a partial answer, none is complete, and a reader landing on any of them gets a third of what the site knows.

Merging them is one of the few changes that reliably makes a site better on every measure at once.

The signals

• Several pages answering the same question.
• None of them ranking well.
• The wrong one chosen by search results.
• You cannot decide which to link to.
• Traffic split thinly across all of them.

The third is the clearest evidence. Search your topic with your own domain specified and see which page comes back; where it is not the page you would have chosen, the site is confusing itself.

Which address survives

The decision that determines whether merging helps or costs you.

Keep the address with the most traffic, the best positions, and any links from other sites.

That is frequently not the page you like most, and it is the one carrying the accumulated standing.

Where a blog post outranks the service page, the honest answer may be to keep the blog post's address and make it the service page, which feels wrong and works.

Check for external links before deciding, since a page with links from other sites is carrying something the others are not.

Record the figures for all three before starting, since the whole point is to compare afterwards.

Merging the content properly

Which is not pasting three pages together.

Write the question the merged page answers, list what a reader needs in order, and then take from the three pages what fits, exactly as you would when rewriting.

Expect to discard a good deal, since three overlapping pages contain the same material three times in different words.

Keep the best version of each point rather than combining them, which produces a page saying everything twice.

The merged page should be longer than any of the originals and considerably shorter than the three added together.

Where a section genuinely belongs elsewhere, move it to that page rather than carrying it into the merge.

A worked example

A site had a service page, a blog post from three years earlier, and a page created for a variant phrase, all about the same work.

The blog post had the most traffic and two links from local sites. The service page had the better content. The variant page had almost nothing.

They kept the blog post's address, rewrote it into a proper service page using the better material from the other two, and retitled it.

The other two were redirected to it and removed from the navigation.

Within three months the merged page was ranking better than any of the three had, and total traffic to that subject was up despite there being one page instead of three.

The awkward part had been keeping an address that looked like a blog post, which mattered to nobody except them.

Redirect, do not delete

The mechanics, and getting this wrong wastes the exercise.

Redirect each removed address permanently to the merged page, not to the home page and not to a category.

Update every internal link that pointed at the old pages so it points at the survivor directly.

Update the sitemap, remove the old pages from the navigation, and check for errors a fortnight later.

Leave the redirects in place indefinitely, since external links and printed references keep arriving for years.

Where a merged page later changes address again, chain the old redirects to the new destination rather than leaving them pointing at a redirect.

Tidy the title and the address

A judgement call worth making deliberately.

The surviving address may describe the old page rather than the merged one, which is untidy and rarely worth fixing.

Changing the address means redirecting the strongest page you have, which risks the thing you were trying to preserve.

Change the title, the heading, and the content freely, since those carry no such risk.

Live with an address that reads oddly, because readers barely notice addresses and search results show the title.

The exception is an address that is actively misleading about the content, which is worth the risk to fix.

Merging is not always the answer

Since some near-duplicates should be split rather than joined.

Where three pages cover genuinely different questions that happen to share a subject, the answer is to make each properly distinct rather than to combine them.

The test is whether one page could answer all three questions well without becoming unwieldy.

Where it could, merge. Where the result would be a page covering four different intentions, you have a splitting problem wearing merging clothes.

Look at the queries each page receives, which tells you whether they are three versions of one question or three different ones.

Merging is easier than splitting to reverse

Worth knowing when deciding which risk to take.

A merge that goes badly can be partly undone: the old addresses still exist as redirects and can be restored with their content from a backup.

A split that goes badly is harder, since the original page has been dismantled and its position may have gone to a new address that did not inherit it.

That asymmetry is a mild argument for merging when you are unsure, and for splitting only when the evidence is clear.

Keep a copy of each page before you touch it, which costs nothing and is the difference between reversible and not.

The counter-case

Merging carries risk.

Two pages each ranking for their own term can both lose position when combined, particularly where the terms are more distinct than they looked.

A merged page also becomes a single point of failure, where three pages spread the risk of any one dropping.

And the work is not small, since a proper merge is a rewrite rather than a copy.

Merge where the pages compete and none wins, keep the strongest address, and record the figures so you can tell whether it worked.

The procedure

1. Record traffic, positions and links for each.
2. Check the queries to confirm they are one question.
3. Keep the strongest address, whichever page it is.
4. Rewrite rather than paste.
5. Redirect the others to the survivor.
6. Update internal links and the sitemap.
7. Compare after three months.

Step three is where businesses go wrong, because the address worth keeping is decided by the figures rather than by which page anybody prefers.

The wider case for fewer pages is covered in removing content and ranking better.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.