Elaine’s Space

Some of my pages are getting extremely long and complicated, particularly the kids Character pages, especially when I’m trying to target different keywords on that page, getting the balance right is getting rather tricky - and  I don’t want to lose those first page positions for xxxbedding, xxxcurtains, xxxxtoys etc.

So, rather bravely or stupidly (depends on the outcome!) I decided to take one of my main revenue pages and split it into 2 different sections - I’ll not say which one, ‘cos I don’t want any outside influences effecting it.   The character pages do lend themselves  to being split into bedding and bedroom accessories  and  toys and games pages,  and without any changes to the actual layout or content.

• Tuesday May 12th split the page and created 2 new pages - pageA/bedding-bedroom-stuff  and  pageB/toys-and-games
• 301′d (permanent redirect) the old page to pageA
• included both new pages in Google sitemaps
• deleted the old page from my server and Google sitemaps
• kept the old page intact on my computer, just in case!

• Tuesday 19th May - the old page has disappeared from Google
• pageA cached on 15th May, but not showing in the serps
• pageB not been indexed at all
• for the term xxxbedding, Google is showing an old, deleted page,  from a different character,  at No 6 (cached 14th May), which leads to my 404 page,  which only has the keywords in the index - go figure
• Allkids is not showing for any of my other previously relevant keywords, pertaining to this character - sweating slightly
• I decide to recreate that old deleted page and change the meta title and description to xxx and a simple explanation with a link to pageA - probaby a knee jerk reaction and on retrospect not really useful!

• Wednesday 20th May - for the term xxxbedding, Google is still showing the other old character page, but now includes pageA below it, in the indented position -good.
• for the term xxxtoys, Google is showing pageA (which has a link to the toys page) at position 8 - pageB still not indexed.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few weeks, will my new pages simply replace my old page and regain all my favourite positions and keywords - and hopefully increase them or will the mighty Google Sandbox kick in, and after initially ranking well, will disappear for several weeks/months before slowly creeping back up to that first page.

I shall keep you posted.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under My Sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.