Consolidate page strength

[NicB1]

Hi,

Our site has a fair amount of related/similiar content that has been historically placed on seperate pages.  Unfortuantely this spreads out our page strength across multiple pages.  We are looking to combine this content onto one page so that our page strength will be focused in one location (optimized for search).   The content is extensive so placing it all on one page isn't ideal from a user experience (better to separate it out).  We are looking into different approaches

1. one main "tabbed" page with query string params to seperate the seperate pages.  We'll use an AJAX driven design, but for non js browsers, we'll gracefully degrade to separate pages with querystring params.

• www.xxx.com/content/?pg=1
• www.xxx.com/content/?pg=2
• www.xxx.com/content/?pg=3

We'd then rel canonical all three pages to just be

• www.xxx.com/content/

2. Same concept but useAJAX crawlable hash tag design (!#).

3. Load everything onto one page, but the page could get quite large so latency will increase.

I don't think from an SEO perspective there is much difference between options 1 & 2.  We'll mostly be relying on Google using the rel canonical tag.

Have others dealt with this issue were you have lots of similiar content.  From a UX perspective you want to separate/classifiy it, but from an SEO perspective want to consolidate?  It really is very similiar content so using a rel canonical makes sense.

What have others done?  Thoughts?

[EnhancedPath]

If it's a Page 1, Page 2, Page 3 type thing, you might want to take a look at the new Google pagination options (rel="next" and rel="prev"):

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html