What if I Moved Blog Posts to Their Corresponding Product Pages?

[aok88]

I am in the process of completely re-vamping and redesigning a Feb '11 Pandalyzed ecommerce site that has a blog that is a mess. The blog has lots of thin posts, broken links, pagination problems, dupe content issues and other problems. But it also has a decent amount of original and good quality content written about the various products.

We're using new blog software with much better architecture on the new site so it will have a much better blog that we're starting from scratch.

I was thinking of adding the best 10-20 blog posts from the old blog to the new one. And then any good quality, original product-related posts that were left, I would add to the actual product pages themselves.

My thinking is that these left over ones are thin on their own, but would be a good addition to product pages that already have other, good content.

How do you think this will affect our Google rankings? Does it hurt you to take lots of your site's page content - and not do any 301ing for them - and moving them to other pages on the same domain? Anyone do this before without much of a problem?

[tedster]

It sounds like a worthwhile experiment - except, what do you mean these leftover blog posts are "thin"?

Let me take that back a bit - it sounds like TWO experiments, so I would only make one change at a time.

[aok88]

Thanks for the reply Tedster. By thin leftover blog posts, I mean they are posts that may have only a couple hundred words, like reviews, and/or have info that's out of date on products, but still relevant, etc.

Yes, it does appear to be more than one experiment, rather about 10 experiments. By doing a complete redesign, an info architecture revamp, a new blog, and adding new content, and more, I don't think avoiding a number of simultaneous changes/experiments is possible. If I could test each change independently, I would, but it would take too long.

My main question is, if you take original content from one page on your site, and move it to another new page, what affect would that have on Google rankings, if any?

[balibones]

aok88, I like the concept, but would make sure that any content you put onto product pages is high quality and up-to-date. That might mean refreshing some of the articles you describe as "out of date on products, but still relevant...".

Please do let me know how this works out. You can Tweet me @balibones . Building links into product pages and using this type of strategy to beef up those pages is something I am very interested in and have presented on several times, most recently at SMX West. Your experiment sounds like it could make an interesting case study, but I'm with Tedster in regard to some of the language you've used that makes me hesitant to fully embrace the strategy - words like "thin", "leftover", and "out of date" specifically.

Good luck!

[Robert Charlton]

I think you run the risk of diluting your product page content by combining the full content of these blog pages into them. (I'm guessing, of course, about the blog post length when I say this).

My inclination would be to have a product-related blog page title (or a modified title) as link anchor text on the product page, with a first sentence or summary from the blog post, and to include the entire blog post on a separate page. If the content is thin or shallow, then fatten or deepen it.

You probably don't want to add all that material to the product page, though, because you may dilute the product information too much.