Why eight pages on the same topic were worth less than one

The starting point

Metodo Gallimberti is an addiction treatment institute with clinics in several Italian cities. Over time their site had built up a lot of content, written at different moments, with no map saying which page should answer which search.

On the priority topic, eight pages with very similar titles and structure all targeted the same question, “how to quit cocaine”: Google had no clear page to pick, and none of them ranked well.

Remove before you write

The first step, in February 2026, was a cleanup. Twelve pages came off the site. Where another page answered the same question better, we set up a 301 redirect; where there wasn’t one, a 410, which tells Google the page was removed on purpose and won’t be coming back.

This step doesn’t show up in the growth charts. Its job was to clear out pages that were dragging down the overall quality of the site, before building on top of it.

One page for each intent

Then came the consolidation. For each group of competing pages we chose the one to keep, usually the strongest in traffic or structure, merged the good parts of the others into it and redirected the rest.

The cocaine topic became a three-level structure: a general page on the addiction, below it the pages on the main intents (quitting, helping a family member), and further down the ones on specific questions, such as withdrawal symptoms or what to do about a son who uses cocaine. Each level links to the one above and to the ones beside it.

The clinical texts were written by the institute’s team. We prepared the structure, laid out what each section should cover and took care of layout, optimization and publishing. On health topics, the expertise of whoever writes counts for more than any technical trick.

At the same time we rewrote the title and description of the main cocaine treatment page so they matched what people were actually searching for, and fixed the site’s structured data. In the following weeks that page’s CTR rose by 18%.

The results

Comparing the last six months with the previous six, clicks on the cocaine cluster grew 2.9 times. It’s now the site’s top topic for traffic, and its main pages moved from the second to the first page of Google.

The growth was concentrated where the consolidation had made room:

• The page on withdrawal symptoms started from practically zero and became the most clicked page in the cluster.
• The one on long-term effects multiplied its clicks by 37.
• The pages for family members, such as a son or husband who uses cocaine, used to get no clicks. Rewritten inside the section for family members, they get them now.

Google’s 2026 updates

In 2026 Google released three algorithm updates that hit sites in the health sector. This site came through them with steady traffic and rising rankings.