301 question for a revamped website

[borishar]

Hey guys,

I am revamping one of my websites, and second-guessing a decision of mine.

It's a website for business reviews. I used to have a separate page for a company profile, example: www.url.com/companies/[company-name]

and each review from a use had it's own link: www.url.com/companies/company-name/[review-title-by-user]

For the new version of the website, I've decided to combine two pages. I am going to have a company profile and all the reviews on a single page, with pagination and canonicals.

The standalone company page is getting traffic, so are the individual review pages. My question is this: Should I 301 all the pages, including the company profile and all the individual review pages to the new style page, which is going to have company profile information and the reviews as well?

The new page structure will be as following: www.url.com/company-name

or should I only 301 the reviews, and not the company profile? My logic dictates to 301 all the pages, profile and reviews, but they seem a bit different from each other and I want to get a second opinion as to whether or not this is the right course of action.

Thank you fellas!

[lucy24]

or should I only 301 the reviews, and not the company profile?

It's not perfectly clear what alternative you're considering. Are you deciding between making a new URL for everything-- company page as well as reviews-- vs. keeping the company page at its original URL and redirecting reviews to the same page?

If you redirect a lot of URLs to a single URL, you can expect Google to suspect you of Soft 404s. So make sure any genuinely bogus request ("example.com/directory/fhuiretghjvcfh.html") continues to get a 404.

It's quite easy to redirect to a fragment:

www.example.com/directory/review1 >> www.example.com/directory/company#review1

www.example.com/directory/review2 >> www.example.com/directory/company#review2

I hope that's the approach you intend to take if you're combining material from different pages onto a single page. Especially if those individual reviews already get human visitors following links or bookmarks. ("Wha--? I don't care about widgets. I already know what widgets are. I want to know what Bill Door, specifically, said about widgets.")

[aristotle]

I agree with Lucy -- You should keep the old company profile pages with their old URLs. Then add the old reviews to the bottoms of those pages.

Then you can redirect each old review page to the specific place that you moved it to.

[aakk9999]

For the new version of the website, I've decided to combine two pages. I am going to have a company profile and all the reviews on a single page, with pagination and canonicals.

This bit which I emphasised in bold is confusing - without it your post would make a perfect sense.

The confusing bit is: if everything for one company will now be combined on the same page, then where does pagination and canonicals feature?

If I ignore that bit in bold, then the way I got it is:

• For each company you currently have two URLs, one for company details and one for company reviews.
  
• You are now combining these two pages to a single page per company, but this new single page will have a different URL because you are changing URL structure of companies.

If this is so then it would be better to do what Lucy and aristotle say:

- do not change the company details URLs and leave them as they are (the structure you gave as an axample www.example.com/companies/company-name is fine). In this case you would only need to redirect old URLs with reviews to company details URL.

If you must have a new URL that contains company details and company reviews:

- in this case for each company redirect the old company details URL and old reviews URL to this new URL.

But what Lucy and aristotle suggested is preferable.

[borishar]

Hi guy,

Thank you for your help. Here are some more details to clear things out.

First of all, the reason for doing this is to avoid getting hammered by panda updates. Each panda update I would lose 30%-40% traffic, only to regain it back the following 6 months, by adding new content. The reason I am getting affected by the panda updates is because the content on each page is very limited, but it was and is out of my control. Pretty much whatever the user writes. However, I do have restrictions for a minimum of 50 words. After considering for a very long time, I have decided to combine the company profile and all the reviews associated with it.

The reason why I didn’t consider leaving the company profile alone, and only combining the review page is, both the old company profile page and the new combined complaints pages would have the same H1, which is the company name. Also the old company profile has some of the review previews on it, with read more pointing to the individual review page. I am afraid of having a duplicate content now, if I keep this page, but what do you think?

I can possibly make the new page have [reviews] word added to the company name, in the h1, but I am not sure if this is a good solution. Some companies have long names, and frankly it just doesn’t seem right to me.

The pagination part is there, because some of the companies have more than 20-30 reviews written about them, and it is not possible to fit them all on one page, so each new combined page will have pagination and appropriate rel next and prevs.

The reason why I can’t properly 301 to an exact location with an anchor is, the page location of the review might change. As the new reviews are added, the old ones get pushed to deeper pages, so the 301 with an anchor might not work properly.

So the current structure is this:

www.url.com/companies/[company-name] - this is ht profile page with company name in the h1

www.url.com/companies/company-name/[review-title-by-user] - these are the individual reviews

New structure:

www.url.com/company-name <<< with h1 as being the company name
www.url.com/company-name/page2
www.url.com/company-name/page3


Also a similar question about the search results. For some reason I have chosen not to [no index] the search results in the past, and the search results pages are getting traffic. For example: www.url.com/search/[company-name-review]

I have decided to move to a google CSE, so the question is, should I 301 the old result pages to a new search using google CSE showing the same results, or just 404 old search results.

Thank you lucy, aristotle, aakk for participating in this thread!

[lucy24]

both the old company profile page and the new combined complaints pages would have the same H1

Why would they have to? At the same time that you're consolidating pages, replace the <h1>company-name</h1> with something like <h2>Reviews of company-name</h2> or simply <h2>Customer Reviews</h2>.

the page location of the review might change. As the new reviews are added, the old ones get pushed to deeper pages, so the 301 with an anchor might not work properly.

Oh, that answers aakk's question about pages. I should point out that dynamic pagination-- the kind that changes when new material is added-- can be quite exasperating for the user, since it makes it impossible to bookmark a particular article. (One of my favorite sites does this. I think it's WordPress, so she can't help it.)

But just how many reviews can a single vendor rack up? Many sites would go to something involving javascript at this point. Even if you stick with a server-side solution, you'd still want to add sort options like "newest first" or "most useful first" or, well, all that ### you get at Amazon.

It may help to explain a little about how -- mechanically -- you're doing this. Is it hand-rolled HTML, your own php code, a CMS ...?

[borishar]

Hi Lucy,

It is a custom written website on python using django. I don't know the exact mechanics, but the new reviews get added on top of the page, pushing the old ones further.

I am not entirely sure about changing h1 to h2. Are you suggesting not have h1 on a page? Also I can not have 4000 company profiles say Customer Reviews as a headline. I am not so clear about that.

What about the search functions. Do you have any suggestions about that at all?

Thank you so much!

[TheMadScientist]

<h1>Company Name</h1>
Company info here

<h2>Customer Reviews</h2>
Reviews here

[borishar]

I make the customers name their reviews, and the review title is h2.

[lucy24]

and the review title is h2.

You mean the title of every single individual review? That seems awfully high anyway. Change it to h3.

:: idly thinking of one website I personally know, where I could swear every single word is <h3> ::