Content consolidation

What content consolidation is

Content consolidation is taking several weak pages that all cover the same subject and building one page that covers it properly. Five posts written over four years, each answering a bit of the same question, become one page that answers all of it, and the five old addresses redirect to it.

It merges. That distinction is worth holding on to, because three different jobs get confused here. Pruning deletes pages with nothing in them worth saving. A refresh plan updates a page and keeps it where it is. Consolidation takes what is good from several pages and throws away only the repetition. Nothing useful is lost in a consolidation, and that is the test of whether it was done properly.

When you need it

You need it when a reader arriving at your site cannot tell which of your pages to read on a subject you sell. That usually shows itself in one of two ways. Somebody asks a question you have answered four times and still has to be sent a link by hand. Or the person doing the selling says “we do have something on that” and then cannot find it.

The second situation is an archive that grew by accident: a topic written about every spring for six years, each piece a little thinner than the last, none of them wrong and none of them complete.

You do not need consolidation if one page is already doing the job and the others are simply dead; that is pruning, and it is cheaper. You do not need it either if the pages are near-identical copies of a commercial page rather than scattered coverage of a subject, which is handled as duplicate page consolidation.

What happens to the five pages

• They are read in full, all of them. The material worth keeping is pulled into one document with its source noted beside it. This is the slow half of the work and it cannot be skipped without losing something.
• The repetition is cut. Where four pages say the same thing four ways, one version survives, and it is usually the clearest rather than the newest.
• The gaps are filled. Five partial answers almost always still leave a hole. It gets written, which is why consolidation is a writing job rather than a copying job.
• One page is built. Structured so that a reader can find the part they came for, with the plain answer near the top and the detail under it.
• The old addresses redirect. Every one of them, to the new page, so that anybody holding a bookmark or an old link arrives somewhere useful rather than nowhere.

What you get

The merged page. One editable document, with a note showing which part came from which original, so anyone in the business can check that their own favourite paragraph survived the process.

The redirect list. The old addresses and where each now points, ready to hand to whoever runs the site.

The internal link fixes. Every place on your own site that linked to one of the old pages, with its replacement. Missing this is the most common way a consolidation quietly breaks a site a fortnight after it looked finished.

A worked example

An illustration. A veterinary clinic in Guelph has five posts about feeding older cats, written between 2019 and last spring by three different vets. One has a good section on kidney values, one has a feeding schedule, one is mostly a recommendation for a food the clinic no longer stocks, and two repeat the first at shorter length.

The merged page keeps the kidney section almost intact. It keeps the schedule and moves it near the top, because that is what people arrive wanting. It drops the food recommendation entirely, and it adds two paragraphs on weight monitoring that none of the five covered, even though it is the first thing the vets ask about in the room. The result is one page of about 1,400 words where there were five of a few hundred. All five old addresses redirect to it and nine links elsewhere on the clinic's site are repointed. The clinic can now send one link instead of choosing between five.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which subjects you suspect are scattered, and who wrote the originals, since somebody usually has a view about their own work. No charge.
2. The grouping. The candidate pages are gathered into groups, and you confirm which groups are worth merging before any writing starts.
3. The merge. Four to seven working days per group, depending on how many pages go into it and how much has to be newly written.
4. Delivery. The merged page, the redirect list and the internal link fixes arrive together, with your own people checking the facts about their trade before anything goes live.

What it costs

Quoted in CAD as a fixed price per group after the half-hour call, and agreed in writing before anything starts. The price is driven by how many pages go into the group and how much of the merged page has to be written from scratch. Several groups done together cost less than the same groups done one at a time. The pricing page shows the four standing ways of working if you would rather this ran inside something ongoing.

What happens next

Consolidation usually comes out of a content audit, which is where the overlapping groups get spotted, and it usually runs alongside pruning, since one pass over the archive produces both lists. The merged page is now the only page on that subject worth maintaining, so it belongs in the refresh plan with a date against it. None of that is assumed. A single group merged is a finished piece of work, and the site is better for it whether or not anything else follows.