Can anyone help with this?

search engine ranking - sort of

[shylo]

Hi everyone:

I am revamping my website. Basicly I am taking all my individual sales pages and condensing them into one page. Putting all my product sales onto one page. However, these individual sales pages are listed on the first or second page of most search engines. Here's my question... How can I still keep the search engine ranking for all these sales pages when these pages will no longer exist? The product will still exist, so I would like the search engines to now be directed to my new single sales page still keeping the searches and ranking for each individual pages.

Is this possible?
Thank Shylo

[Marcia]

To be perfectly honest, unless there's some very compelling reason to condense them, if you're ranking well across all the engines as it is, in your place I'd leave well enough alone.

In the case of a couple of prominent and important engines, the pages may be ranking nicely because of inbound anchor text and/or outbound anchor text, depending on how the site/pages and navigation are set up, and if you condense the pages you could well tip the balance and lose some rankings.

[shylo]

Thank you Marcia. It's important to me to condense the site just because I find 60 some sales pages, 60 some autoresponders, 60 some... well, etc, etc, are more than I wish to continue to handle right now. I was just hoping there might be some way to keep the search engine rankings. May I ask...how is it that some site have 8 or 10 products on one page, and yet they have a listing for each product search on the search engines and each listing goes to the same one page?

[grandpa]

Hi shylo

If its only a few of your pages that you're concerned about, maybe leave them alone, and condense everything as planned. Then you can call them gateway pages...

how is it that some site have 8 or 10 products on one page, and yet they have a listing for each product search on the search engines and each listing goes to the same one page

Content. You can have one product on a page, or one hundred. Doesn't matter. How you write content about the product does matter, and may result in multiple serps. I have many pages with multiple products showing up in a variety of different searches. The more the merrier.

[Mike_Levin]

You should be able to solve your 60 auto-responders, 60, etc. problem through things like server side includes. Usually, you should only have to do the work once, then each page can use that common resource.

As far as one long page versus lots of short pages, there are very compelling reasons for each with the search engines. It is sometimes good to do both, to get both advantages.