Hello all. I currently have a big spuriously long article on my site which has been there for some time (thus it is indexed). Its a situation comparable to say, imdb just having one page called films and then every film ever made on that 1 page. So, its currently all crammed on a bit like this: DOGS ---- DIFFERENT DOGS GOOD THINGS TO DO BAD THINGS TO DO EXTRA TIPS ADVICE FROM PEOPLE WHO KNOW A LOT ABOUT THEM I am about to add some new stuff to it (which is going to make it even more long and spurious!) and feel it could be WAY better organised, palettable and the relevant parts would be better findable by the right people if I broke up each section into individual pages. Obviously there is also a minor advantage from the adsense perspective too, but we're only talking about 7 or 8 pages. Why do I think this is a possibility ? Take Matt C's blog (as an example). He has a lot of separate pages that cover different aspects of the same subject. Eg: SEO Mistakes: Don't do this. SEO Mistakes: Watch out for this. SEO Mistakes: Here's another. SEO Mistakes: Something else to consider. If you put all those on one page, it'd be the same as what I have right now. So, the question is this: Can this be done safely without getting slammed by google for duplicate content or something crazy like that? and: If I do this, what is the best way ? Do I 301 the old page to one of the new ones ? 404 it instead ? make sure its noindexed first, then delete it ? I think I could really make the information more reachable if I divided it up and targeted each subject properly. Super thanks and kind regards.
I've done this several times in the past when an article has become too big for it's own good. My approach is to 301 the original URL to one of your new pages (preferably the most relevant). This makes sure that you keep the link juice you've spent your time building. I then interlink the new pages/articles using relevant keywords from within each articles content. This ensures that some of that original link factor is then passed between the new pages. Doing it this way (making sure that the full article isn't available once I split it) has worked every time for me, within weeks each new page is attracting it's own Google search traffic and no signs of a dupe content penalty.