Your pages are competing with each other, and summaries make it worse

When ten blue links were the whole result, two similar pages simply took two slots. When a single composed answer sits above the links, one source is quoted — so two half-strength pages on the same question tend to lose to one page that covers it completely.

What did not change: publishing more pages on genuinely different questions is still good. The problem is repetition, not volume. A tools page, a guide and an FAQ that answer the same query in the same way are the case to fix; three pages on three distinct intents are not.

Start with your own sitemap and titles. Run the site audit on /seo-audit to crawl your URLs, then read the duplicate-title and missing-description lists — overlapping titles are the cheapest reliable signal of overlapping intent.

Then take the query each candidate page targets and check which URL actually ranks, twice a week apart. A stable URL means the search engine has picked a winner; a URL that alternates means your signals are split. Finish by comparing the two pages' keyword density: if the top terms are near-identical, they are the same page in two files.

Pick one canonical page per question and merge the rest into it in a single afternoon. The winner is normally the page with the most referring pages and the closest title match — not the newest one.

The mechanism matters: merging moves link equity and removes the ambiguity that made retrieval pick a weaker passage. Redirect rather than delete, so external links keep pointing somewhere useful.

Watch the position of the surviving URL for the shared query, weekly for four to six weeks. Consolidation usually shows up as the merged page settling above where either page sat individually, once the redirect has been recrawled.

Before blaming the merge for a drop, rule out the mechanical failures: a redirect chain, a page still returning noindex, or an internal link left pointing at the old URL. Re-crawl and confirm the winner is indexable and reachable.