Advice on whether we 301 redirect a page or update existing page?

[davo23]

Hi guys,

any advice would be really appreciated. We have an existing page that ranks well for 'red widgets'. The page isn't monetised right now, but we're bringing in a new product onto our site that we optimised for 'blue widgets'. Unfortunately, not enough research was done for this page and we've now realised that consumers actually search for 'red widgets' when looking for the product we're creating as 'blue widgets'.

The problem with this is that the 'red widgets' page is in a completely different category of our site than what it needs to be (it needs to be with 'blue widgets').

So, my question is; Should we do a 301 redirect from our 'red-widgets' page to our 'blue-widgets' page which we want to update and optimise the content on there for 'red-widgets'. Or, should we update the existing red-widgets page to have the right products and content on there, even thought it is in the wrong place of our site and users could get confused as to why they are there.

If we do a 301 redirect to our new page, will we lose our rankings and have to start again, or is there a better way around this?

Thanks!

Dave

[tomwhite]

Without seeing the pages, url structure and how similar/different the products are its a bit hard to advise.

However in general if you already have a page ranking, and it is possible to overcome the confusion issues (which can probably be done through design?) I would probably leave the page there, and tweak the content to include your 'blue widget' (but remember part of the reason you are ranking for the term 'red widget' is due to the content on your page so it will still need to be optimised for this.

I've done 301 redirects a few times and when done internally they usually don't cause any long-term drops, however they may cause short-term (which can last a while) your page to disappear while Google re-ranks the new page (and the exact ranking will depending on the new page URL structure, content, page hierarchy etc).

Hope that helps and makes sense