We asked whether the overlapping collections were genuinely different categories to your customers. The answers were clear: Beach Towels and Travel Towels are the same thing, Multi Towels and Tea Towels are the same thing, and Hooded Towels and Poncho Towels are the same thing. Kids Hooded Towels has a real purpose of its own, and Beach Blankets is a category you want to keep chasing.
One piece of history is worth getting exactly right, so we checked it against the Internet Archive rather than anyone's memory. The archive shows these collection pages already existed months before our engagement began in October 2025: Poncho and Microfibre Towels were first captured in May 2025, Beach Towels in May 2025, Dog and Tea Towels in June, Multi Towels in July. So the two-pages-per-category structure predates all of us on this thread, most likely from earlier SEO advice, and it was a common playbook at the time. The one exception is Beach Blankets, which was set up this year during our engagement.
Our part in it is straightforward: our keyword mapping worked within that structure for nine months rather than questioning it, and the current page titles were written to our specification. Neither of those flagged the real problem, which is that the paired pages carry identical product sets. Google now treats pages like that as duplicates and quietly serves neither. The clearest proof: Beach Towels has been indexed for sixteen months, was recrawled as recently as 5 August, and has never once been shown in results. Not a penalty, not a link problem. A trust problem between two identical pages, and as of August 2026 the fix below is what we recommend.
In every merge, the surviving page is the one Google already trusts most, measured by twelve months of non-branded impressions from your own Search Console. The retired URL is permanently redirected into it, so nothing 404s and any equity it holds transfers.
| Merge | Keeps the URL | Why that one | Retired URL |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | /collections/travel-towels | 45,503 impressions vs 0. Sixteen months of ranking history. | /collections/beach-towels |
| 2 | /collections/tea-towel | 9,961 impressions vs 207. | /collections/multi-towels |
| 3 | /collections/hooded-towels | 27,717 impressions vs 1,807. | /collections/poncho-towels |
| 4 | /collections/travel-towels | Its 24 products already live across the surviving pages, half of them on travel towels. | /collections/microfibre-towels |
| Travel Towels (absorbs Beach Towels + Microfibre) | Tea Towels (absorbs Multi) | Hooded Towels (absorbs Poncho) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| New title | Quick Dry Microfibre Beach & Travel Towels | Will & Wind 56 | Tea Towels & Multi Towels - Soft & Absorbent | Will & Wind 58 | Hooded Towels for Adults & Kids - Quick Dry | Will & Wind 56 |
| New H1 | Quick dry beach and travel towels, sand free by design | Tea towels and multi towels | Hooded towels for adults and kids |
| Language folded in | Beach towel, quick dry beach towel, microfibre towel in the title itself, sand free in the H1 and description. The best copy from the Beach Towels page moves across rather than being thrown away. | Multi towel (every SKU is named Multi-Towel, so it belongs here naturally) | Poncho and towel poncho, in the intro and description. The two Poncho-only bundle SKUs move into this collection. |
| Plus | The intro paragraph and FAQ from the approved on-page plan | De-emphasise generic quick-dry phrasing so it stops competing with towels | Adults section added so adult searches finally have a landing place |
| Collection | Decision | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| /collections/kids-hooded-towels | Keep. Predates the engagement, it is your most popular category, and the parent collection listing kids sizes for comparison is deliberate. | Nothing structural. The kids page owns kids searches, the parent owns adult searches, the two link to each other. Titles per the approved on-page plan. |
| /collections/beach-blankets | Keep, and differentiate in two steps. For now the two blankets stay listed on Travel Towels as well, so the traffic they already earn there is not put at risk before this page has proven it can rank on its own. | A correction from our earlier draft, caught by Anna: this collection holds exactly two products, the Kalbarri and Ningaloo blankets. Our crawl had wrongly counted the Hair Wrap because it sits next to this page in the site menu, not in the collection itself. We track the page standalone over the same four to eight week window as everything else; if it picks up real impressions and clicks, the two blankets come off Travel Towels at that point to make it unique. Full review at three months: if the category still is not ranking and the range has not grown past two products, we reconsider whether it earns its place at all. |
Four blog posts still link to the old underscore URL /collections/hooded_towels, which now redirects. Those links get repointed to the proper page at the same time as everything else.
Anna asked whether we could find every place the Microfibre Towels collection is linked before touching it. We crawled all 122 blog posts and 16 site pages. The answer is reassuring:
| Where | What links there | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Blog content | 5 links across 4 posts (the tea towel gifts post, the sustainable towel guide, the caravan packing post, and the adult hooded towels post) | Repoint each to the most relevant surviving collection |
| Site navigation | One menu entry, present on every page | Remove or repoint to Travel Towels |
| Everything else | Nothing. No other page on the site links to it | The permanent redirect catches any link we cannot see, including external ones |
The same crawl covered every merging collection. The full inventory: Beach Towels has 5 in-content links across 3 posts, Multi Towels 4 across 2, Poncho Towels none at all. Travel Towels, the main surviving page, already has 262 in-content links from 86 posts, which is exactly the concentration we want.
All impression figures: your Google Search Console, non-branded, 27 July 2025 to 26 July 2026, Australia. Link counts: full crawl of your blog and pages, 20 August 2026. Product overlaps: live crawl of every collection, verified twice.