Hello all. I currently have a big spuriously long article on my site which has been there for some time (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, it's 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 users if I broke up each section into individual pages. Obviously there is also a slight advantage from the adsense perspective too, but that is of little benefit as we are 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 by the people who want to find it if I divided it up and targeted each subject properly. Super thanks and kind regards.
You'll actually rank better for each individual subject if you separate them to their own pages. Create a page for dogs that holds the basic information, then link from that page to all of your other dog pages. Of course, have your other dog pages link back to the basic page...or to all the other dog pages depending on the size of your site. Make sure you set a good page title, description, and h1 tag for each page. You'll notice you get more long tail hits if you keep each page very discrete in subject.