Last Updated on December 28, 2021 by scottkandh

Consolidate Link Juice in a Single Page. Often websites accumulate over time multiple pages on very similar topics. For example, a real estate agent’s website may have pages on the advantages of working with an agent, how the agent can help sellers, and how the agent can help buyers. All of these pages are thematically related and may be targeting some of the same keywords.

However, by dividing the topic up into 3 separate pages the agent is also dividing his Page Strength, possibly making each individual page too weak to rank for the target keywords. In situations like this it can make sense to consolidate multiple smaller, thematically-related pages into a single comprehensive page.

If you do so as described in this post, you can concentrate the power of your inbound links to create a single, more authoritative page which is able to rank for more keywords than multiple smaller pages.

Consolidate Link Juice in a Single Page

Identify pages that may be good candidates for consolidation

Review your website to find pages that meet one or more of the following requirements:

• targeting the same keyword (or a variation) as other pages
• content is closely related to other pages on your site
• very little text content

Filter your consolidation candidates according to link juice

There’s no SEO benefit to consolidating multiple pages that each have 0 inbound links into a single page that also has 0 inbound links. Thus, the second step is to identify which consolidation candidate has enough inbound links to justify consolidation. A few possible tools to do this:

• Backlink checkers like OpenSiteExplorer, MajesticSEO, or Ahrefs, will give you a list of the links pointing to each page, but all require a paid subscription to get the complete data.

• Use Google PageRank as a proxy for the authority of each page. A tool like BulkPageRank will let you enter all of your consolidation candidate URLs, and filter out those with Page Rank less than 1 or 2.

• If you only have a few URLs to check, install an SEO toolbar such as SEOQuake or the SEOMoz toolbar, which will give you data about any page that you visit.

Consolidate the related pages into a single combined page

Once you’ve identified the best pages to combine for maximum usability and SEO benefit, create a new page and combine the content of all three pages. Put each page’s content into a separate section and give it its own heading. Finally, use anchors to link directly to each section.

301 redirect the URLs of the old pages to your new consolidated page

The last step is a bit trickier, but it’s essential to realizing an SEO benefit and ensuring that visitors to your old pages end up at the right place. You’ll use a server command called a 301 permanent redirect to tell visitors (including search engines) that the old page content has been moved to a new URL. There are several ways to create 301 redirects:

• Use a plugin for your CMS system (such as Redirection for WordPress)
• Use code: here are some examples for various languages
• Use an .htaccess file (for Apache servers) or IIS redirect (for Microsoft IIS)

Tips

• Watch out for overlap in your inbound links: if all 3 pages have links from the same websites, consolidating will bring no benefit (since multiple links from the same source don’t carry as much weight as multiple links from different sources). Ideally, you’ll want to consolidate pages with no overlap in their inbound link sources.

Please check out this related post that pertains to Thematic Content:

Boost your Website Relevancy by Bulking up on Thematic Content