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Hello A A,

Your post got me paranoid and I went around to all the different online tools that will check rankings from different data centers like http://dccheck.com/ .  I got a wide variety of responses  from these tools and it made me wonder if they worked at all.  I also don't have any hard answers for you and it sounds like you may have had some trouble in the past;however it is possible you are freaking out about nothing.  Is your traffic stable?  You could check google analytics and filter for search traffic then your keywords.  From there go and check the geographic map the traffic is coming from.  Compare a current time period this way to a past time period when you know you were ranking well.  It it is not too different, maybe there is nothing to worry about. Does that help?

I don't know if you have technical issues doing this.  If you do, Drupal Commerce module does this elegantly.  http://www.drupalcommerce.org/  It will allow you to have one product with many displays on one page.

Does each product have a unique product description?   If not, I'd go with one page for sure. Would a user type in the same keywords to find all of those products?  If yes, again one page is the winner IMHO.

When I Google long hairstyles I only get http://pinterest.com/hairstylesweekl/long-hairstyles-for-women-2012-2013-long-hairstyle/  in the third position.  I've noticed recently a very similar pattern with etsy.com stores.  They are ranking #1 for several very competitive terms on pretty weak external link profiles.  To me it just looks like a few external links to a deep page on a high authority root domain combined with a good title tag and a lot of internal linking.   I'd say nobody is keeping you from playing the same game.

I wonder the same thing.  It's way easier to build links for a non-commercial site. If you were to bait and switch,  I'd think you'd want to keep the basic content that was linked to to be fair to those who linked to you.

Thanks EGOL,  Fantastic answer.  I'm looking for a new foundation to work from and would love to work hard on just one site.  I'm pretty sure the sites will work best together in the long run but,  I sure don't want to mess up what I already have.

Thanks for the thoughtful response.  To tell you the truth I do have a lot of quality content that didn't quite fit on either site well that I could use as the base content for the branded site.

I run two websites that sell basically the same product which we make ourselves but to two separate audiences.  I've made my living off them for the past 6 years or so.  I used emd's in both cases to rank for my main search terms.  We dropped a few places last October but not too bad.  I was thinking of combining the sites under one brand name hoping that they would rank better combined.  Both sites have similar link profiles but with some links unique to each.  For instance, I buy a yahoo directory listing  for each site but each site has some unique product reviews on blogs.  Is this a good idea or am I better off leaving them separate?

That's some great advice.  I can see that the quick win is something of a losers strategy.  Content is king.

That's why you're an Oracle.  Thanks for that.  I was looking at a short win and that is  the long game.

Thanks for the responses,

I should add that it is a page of ads.  They have 1200 or so links to their root and 9 to this page.   I guess I know  to play it safe i should work this one from outside but, it is a big deal to get that business back.

When I Google long hairstyles I only get http://pinterest.com/hairstylesweekl/long-hairstyles-for-women-2012-2013-long-hairstyle/  in the third position.  I've noticed recently a very similar pattern with etsy.com stores.  They are ranking #1 for several very competitive terms on pretty weak external link profiles.  To me it just looks like a few external links to a deep page on a high authority root domain combined with a good title tag and a lot of internal linking.   I'd say nobody is keeping you from playing the same game.

I don't know if you have technical issues doing this.  If you do, Drupal Commerce module does this elegantly.  http://www.drupalcommerce.org/  It will allow you to have one product with many displays on one page.

Does each product have a unique product description?   If not, I'd go with one page for sure. Would a user type in the same keywords to find all of those products?  If yes, again one page is the winner IMHO.