Help with Content Revamp

[isle_surf]

Many years ago we wrote about 60 content pages for our surfboard e-commerce website targeting all the top popular keywords. Many of them generic but very keyword focused.

We are now revamping our content our our site and want to move away from the generic side of things and actually rewrite all the pages to make them very useful and actually stuff our customers can really use and will find very helpful.

I noticed that many times we wrote small pages less than 500 words that target similar keywords around a general theme. In looking at the analytics all the pages are getting a good amount of traffic and ranking well but im wondering would it be ok to focus on a main topic and combine similar pages if they are related? So i can take the say 60 articles and combine it down to say 10 articles and make the articles cover alot more stuff instead of just being small 500 word articles.

As an example we have many surfboard models so we wrote an article for

-Longboard Surfboards

-Funboard Surfboards

-Mini Malibu Surfboards

-Retro Fish Surfboards

-Womens Surfboards

-Beginner Surfboards

My question is could i weave these all together and write one long guide on say "Choosing The Type of Surboard you need" and cover all the board models in that article and then redirect the old pages to point to that one article. Would i still rank well for all these words Or would this destroy all my current rankings for these words?

What is the best approach to rewriting and or combining old content pages that currently rank well but could be combined with others around the same theme to make it more user friendly?

[Mcarle]

It depends on what those 60 articles are about...

It looks like some of them can be expanded into larger guides:

"How to choose a woman's surfboard"

Make this page oodles bigger with pretty images & several links to

the best top 5 brands of women's surfboards.

Then with the more specific ones like longboard surfboards

again expand it to just ad more images more text and make that page bigger.

You can totally take two general blah articles and edit them so that each one is more specifc and less general by adding text images tags and adding to the the copy.

[EGOL]

I started salivating when I read what you currently have on your site.

Then I got a little nervous when you talked about combining all of those great pages.  I believe that if you do that you will create ten powerful pages... but I think that some of your granular rankings will be lost.

Don't get me wrong, I am a enormous advocate of the huge, substantive article with lots of big juicy images.

Here's what I would try if this was my site.

I would make those ten big pages and optimize them like categories.   However, instead of rewriting I would make them look like blog category pages with the first 100 words of each sub article and a really nice image for each.  These would link to your current article pages similar to a category page of a blog linking to blog posts.

I would also put work into each of those 60 articles... improving them, adding photos, updating the information.

I think that this would be kickass giving you the best of both.

Since blogs do linking this way everywhere, I think that the risk is low.