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.
2 comments:
7/24/11
I just removed and re-directed three pages relating to FETs too. The page(s) removed were almost the same as the pages they were redirected to, so I guess I removed some similar content.
So between today and yesterday I removed and redirected 13 pages. All with less than 365 page views a year, so no harm done. Most never even reaching 365 visits in 2 1/2 years...
Just ran Xenu and no bad internal links were found, so I guess I'm good.
8/8/11 Looks like a few of the redirected pages have fallen out of the index. Which sounds about right, because I normally assume that a page gets spider-ed around once a month. So, another week or so and the rest of the pages that have been redirected should drop out as well.
So if your wondering how long does it take Google to detect a changed page, it would be about a month [at least for this site]. Of course there are pages on the site that will receive a visit form a spider more often, but in general it takes 30 days or so. The same is true for a new page, because Google would have to first spider a page with the link and than crawl the new page too.
Like I've said in the past, if you blog about the page change or page addition, Google may see the change sooner. As Google reads the new blog post as soon as the post button is hit. After all Google owns Blogger.
It's still to soon to see if the increase in page sizes will do anything. The over-all increase in text is small, and may not amount to anything if the new text doesn't contain a key word that was used in a search. Plus these pages were not getting any kind of hits anyway, so only a large jump in traffic will show up on my counter.
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