Should I combine pages to consolidate information

In the last few day I've been removing a few pages from the site. Well I remove pages all the time, but in this case I've been combining pages. The thought is, take a page that gets almost no incoming visitors and combine it with a related page, that may also not receive many hits producing a page that may get more hits because it twice as large. Perhaps not twice as large, because any duplicate information would have to be removed.

Removing a page means one less pages that have to be maintained. However it also means one less page that may bring in a visitor. The opposite view would be, one less page that competes with an existing page.

Pages on the site are not introduced based on the amount of traffic they may generate. So when a new page is uploaded there is no way to tell how many visitors the page might bring in. Normally it could takes months before a page is determined to be generating any type of visits, as it could take a month just to be found by the bots.

So any way back in 2009 two pages were generated covering 2N930 High Temperature Operation; one for the TO-18 package and one for the surface mount version. Well neither page generates any kind of traffic. The surface mount version had 103 pageviews and the metal can version had 342 page-views, both really low. It could also be that many of those 103 visitors were due to a click-through from the 'main' 2N930 page, meaning that the surface-mount page was getting even less page-views.

Now the combined page is 20% larger than before. The additional information is below the original data so should not decrease it's value, but increase the value of the page. That is, moving data lower down a page may decrease its value to a search engine. Leaving the text as it was maintains its prior importance, while adding more text increases the importance of the page. Another benefit is that reduces the number of pages similar to each other.

The pages have to be combined. The site map has to be updated. The deleted page has to be redirected and any graphics have to be removed from the server. Otherwise the bots would continue to download the graphics, using bandwidth for no reason.

Another page that got combined was the How to Derate a 2N2604 Transistor page. Having even less page views than the 2N930 page...... The next page to be combined will be the When to Derate a 2N2484 Transistor some time today. I've already redirected two of the sub-pages.

Also just combined the Derating a 2N4931 Transistor and 2N3743 Transistor page as well, which had the lowest page views of another of the other sets.

Other than blogging about when and why to combine pages, this post may also serve to get the updated versions spider-ed, so Google will see the update sooner.

The only down side to removing pages is that internal site pages see fewer internal links. The pages that were removed linked to other pages on the site, now they don't. Of course I might miss a link or forget to delete a graphic off the server.

Google Labs Site Performance

So I haven't posted in awhile. I've just been off working on the web site, which brings in a lot more money than this blog. I have started a few posts, but never ended up finishing them, so they got deleted.

Anyway I wanted to re-post some more data on Google's Site Performance, which shows page loading speed. This is their estimate of how long it takes a page to render in a browser. Than all the pages viewed that day are averaged into a single number.

There's nothing new with this post from any of the previous posts on this topic, which can be found by searching in the blog bar above for 'site performance', but I did change a setting on the server the other day.

I had the server set up to log visitor data for both AWSTATS and Webalizer. I really use AWSTATS each day, if I look at it, but there were times when I wanted to see data from Webalizer (which formats the same data a bit different). I also use Google Analytics to capture visitors data, so I had three different programs collecting the same data. The Google product is the best, but I have history data with AWSTATS so I really want to keep that running for comparing previous years.

On the 7th of this month I turned, the server-side,  Webalizer off, and waited to see if that improved the site performance of the web-site. A week later I still can't say if removing that program helped at all, but the page speed seemed to get faster {at first}.

One week of data is not much, so it's still to early to make any kind of judgment, but I am watching. The graph below shows the data for the last six months. The first big drop (increase in speed) in July is the day I turned of Webalizer. Note that the speed decreased a few days later and than decreased again, but changes in speed should be considered normal. It's the drop that got my attention.

There's nothing special about the speed, the site has hovered around 3 seconds for over a year. At this point all the pic files have been optimized, excess white space has been removed form the site and so on. Not much more I could do. Maybe send out a mess email to the world to upgrade their PC, so the site loads faster.....

I should say, that I'm always adding new data, either as new pages or additions to an existing page. So I would consider it 'normal' for the page speed to get slower regardless of what I do, because all the pages are slowly growing larger. More picture files are also always being added. So I may have reduced the [code] size of a page by removing all the white-space, but added more text off setting any speed improvement.

I'll add a comment in a few days to update the data, if it changes one way or the other. But it's something to think about, if your running a bunch of server side stuff that may not be required.