Condensing content for web site redesign

[ATShock]

We're working on a redesign and are wondering if we should condense some of the content (as recommended by an agency), and if so, how that will affect our organic efforts. Currently a few topics have individual pages for each section, such as (1) Overview (2) Symptoms and (3) Treatment. For reference, the site has a similar structure to  http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/guide/heart-disease-overview-fact.

Our agency has sent us over mock-ups which show these topics being condensed into one and using a script/AJAX to display only the content that is clicked on. Knowing this, if we were to choose this option, that would result in us having to implement redirects because only one page would exist, instead of all three.

Can anyone provide insight into whether we should keep the topic structure as is, or if we should take the agency's advice and merge all the topic content? *Note: The reason the agency is pushing for the merging option is because they say it helps with page load time.

Thank you in advance for any insight!

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[Matthew_Edgar]

Hey Vanessa. I'd ask a few additional questions about the pages before making a decision...

1. If you were to implement redirects, would the redirect go from Treatment (the page) -> Treatment (the Ajax-loaded content)? Or, would it go from Treatment (the page) -> topic page (and people would have to click a link to view treatment content)? If the redirect goes from the page, to the related content of the page then maybe this isn't too terrible an idea. That would mean the Ajax-loaded page section for treatment would have some unique kind of URL associated with it (like /topic-name#treatment).

2. Next question, though, is how much traffic does this affect? Of the traffic those pages get individually right now, how much of that traffic enters the site on those pages (from any source - direct, referral, social, organic, paid)? If right now almost everybody comes into the site via an overview page and then clicks to Symptoms or Treatment, then probably okay to consolidate those into a single page. That said, if all three pages are landing pages for a reasonable amount of visitors I'd be reluctant to make this kind of change to disrupt the traffic...esp. if the answer to question #1 is no.

3. What about links? Do you have a lot of links pointing to the individual pages within each section? Yes, redirects will help retain the link equity, but with any redirect you lose some. So, if a large percent of the links to your site are to these pages, I'd be hesitant to make any kind of change without further testing/research around the weight and importance of those links.

Along with those questions, I'm also wondering why the agency thinks this would help with load time. Why can't they improve load time on the individual pages? Are they talking about the load time from clicking to the Treatment page from Symptoms? If so, there are probably better ways to address that vs. removing pages from the site. When you run a speed test, what is slowing down the page load? Is it something with the server or content that can be tweaked? I'd start there before trying to consolidate pages and running the risk of disrupting any existing traffic.

I hope that helps as you work toward a decision.

[BradsDeals]

I think the general idea is a good one. Having one very thorough and authoritative page about the common cold should be more powerful than three weaker pages that all compete for the same keywords. In fact, we did something similar last year when we pulled coupons, deals and reviews into a single page, but our review pages hadn't quite taken off and we knew that people don't really search for deals the way they search for coupons, so consolidating made sense to beef up the content in a single authoritative place.

However, in the medical niche I'd be very wary of losing traffic that would have gone to symptom and treatment pages, just knowing (ok, I didn't look anything up, but I can guess) how often those are specifically searched and the indexing issues we've had with content inside collapsible divs. John Mueller has said before that if that content was really so important, you wouldn't be hiding it behind a click. It's a really big risk. If there's a way to test it on a handful of pages before rolling out any sitewide changes, I would absolutely do that.