Two of your own pages are fighting over the same search

Blogging advice tells you to publish consistently around your topic. Follow it for two years and you end up with a service page about the thing, and eleven articles about the thing, all quietly bidding against each other for the one phrase that is worth money.

We had twenty-three of them. Merging them into the pages they were competing with took an afternoon, and search performance went up. The counterintuitive part is that the fix was deletion.

How to see it

1. Search Console, Performance. Click a query that matters.
2. With the query filter still applied, switch to the Pages tab.
3. One URL is healthy. Two or more of your URLs against a single query is the split.
4. Add a date comparison. The signature is the positions swapping over time rather than one climbing — Google keeps changing its mind about which of your pages is the answer.

That is the signature: not one page climbing, but Google changing its mind every week about which of yours is the answer.

The symptom owners actually notice first is different: a page that sat at position six for months, wobbling, never breaking into the top three, no matter what got added to it.

Deciding which one survives

Not the one currently ranking best. The one you want the visitor to land on. Almost always the commercial page, because a blog post that ranks well and converts nobody is a cost.

Then, for each loser:

• Move anything genuinely useful into the survivor, as a real section with its own heading. This is the step people skip, and skipping it is why the merged page sometimes drops.
• Redirect the old URL to the survivor with a 301, permanently. Not a 302, not a meta refresh, not deletion.
• Fix internal links that pointed at the old URL. Redirected links work, but a chain of them is sloppy and slow.
• Leave the redirect in place forever. It is one line in a config file and it is holding whatever links that page had.

/blog/how-to-fix-a-furnace  /services/furnace-repair  301

On a static site this is a redirects file, not a plugin. On Cloudflare Pages it is a line in _redirects: the old path, the new path, 301.

What to expect, and when

Nothing for two or three weeks. Google has to recrawl both URLs and decide the redirect is real. Then the survivor moves, usually up, and stops wobbling. Judge it at six weeks, not six days.

Keep a list of what you merged into what. In two months somebody will ask where an article went and the honest answer — it is now the third section of this page — is much easier to give if you wrote it down.

The one that hurts to admit

Publishing more was actively making the money pages worse, for months, while looking like productivity.

All twenty-three of those posts were work. Somebody wrote them and they were fine. They were also the reason the pages that sell things could not get past position six. Publishing more was actively making the money pages worse, for months, while looking like productivity.