My blog's categories are winning over my landing pages, what to do?
-
Hi
My blogs categories for the ecommerce site are by subject and are similar to the product landing pages.
Example
Domain.com/laptops that sells laptops
Domain.com/blog/laptops that shows news and articles on laptops
Within the blog posts the links of anchor laptop are to the store.
What to do?
Thanks
-
Hi denverish,
The results for now are quite interesting... As I mentioned above I added texts to the category pages which I wanted to turn into landing pages. In one case, I also added NOINDEX to the matching category on the blog and in the others I didn't.
The result was that where I added the NOINDEX the blog category obviously disappeared (was mid second page) and an article from deep within the site replaced it - BUT NOT the wished landing page. Keep in mind that the category page on the blog linked to posts that each linked back to the desired category page.
The other pages on which I added the texts are gaining real good placements within the SERPS. Most are now on top of page 2 and are tougher phrases.
It is as if all of the posts within the category I now "NOINDEX" have lost their weight!
I am today planning on removing the NOINDEX and will see in a month or so (hopefully sooner) where I stand.
I am surprised from the result!
-
Hi there! How did things turn out?
-
Great, it is always wise to test changes! Looking forward to hearing about your results.
-
I didn't get a yes/no answer but based on the above I'm currently trying to add some information to the category pages (snippets to the important articles).
Another thing I just tried is to add NOINDEX on one of the category pages and see how it works.
This way google will still crawl it but just won't serve it in the SERPS (which is fine by me).
I will update how it works
-
You are correct about the blog posts themselves and that's ok.
The problem I'm having is that the category pages rank too high (more than the category pages).I am trying to add information to the category pages as well as de-indexing (NOINDEX) one of the category pages as a test...
-
Hi methodicalweb,
I have a relatively new site so links are not the reason...
-
Hi there, thanks for your question! You've received some excellent responses. Did any of them answer your question? If so, please mark one or more as a "good answer". If not, please provide us with the requested details so we can help you resolve this. Thanks!
Christy
-
I agree with the 2 responses above.
Your blog is probably ranking because it has more links/shares (or at least more recent links/shares) and potentially more relevant content. You should try improving the content on the laptops products page.
You should also make it very easy for someone visiting your blog to get to your products to purchase them. If the blog is well written and useful/engaging, this might be a good opportunity for your content marketing to form a key part of your customer journey.
-
When you say winning, do you mean ranking higher, or getting indexed instead of your store's pages?
Chances are your blog posts are targeted directly at certain questions and information and have links pointing back at them. Do your store pages have the same? Most stores have an area when you can add information to the landing pages.
Can you provide a link to the store, so that I may have a closer look? It's difficult to give you a accurate answer without seeing how the store/blog is set up.
-
This happens to me as well, are the title tags and descriptions similar to each other? What i did in one instance was redirected the blog post to the desired page, but there may be a better solution for you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pillar pages and blog pages
Hello, I was watching this video about pillar pages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db3TpDZf_to and tried to apply it to my self but find it impossible to do (but maybe I am looking at it the wrong way). Let's say I want to rank on "Normandy bike tou"r. I created a pillar page about "Normandy bike tour" what would be the topics of the subpages boosting that pillar page. I know that it should be questions people have but in the tourism industry they don't have any, they just want us to make them dream !! I though about doing more general blog pages about things such as : Places to rent a bike in Normandy or in XYZ city ? ( related to biking) Or the landing sites in Normandy ? (not related to biking) Is it the way to do it, what do you recommend ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Portfolio Image Landing Page Question/Issue
Hello, We have a client with a very image heavy website. They have Portfolio pages with a large number of images. We are currently working on adding more copy to the site but wanted to confirm we are taking the right approach for the images on the site. Under the current structure each image has its own landing page (with no copy) and is fed in (or generated on) to a Portfolio Page. While we know this is not ideal as it would be best to have the images on the Portfolio Page directly or even fill out the landing pages with copy; due to the amount of images and the fact these are only images (and not a 'targeted' page) that would not really be feasible. Aside from the thin content concern these individual landing pages were being indexed so they are showing hundreds of pages on their sitemap.xml and in GSC even though they only have a few actual pages. In the meantime we went into each image-page and placed a canonical tag back to the main Portfolio Page (with the hopes to add content to that page and have it as the ‘overarching’ page). Would this be the right approach? – We considered ‘noindex-follow’ tags but would want the images to be crawled; the issue is because the pages are not on the actual page are we canonicalizing these images to nothing? Any insight would really be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R0 -
Print pages returning 404's
Print pages on one of our sister sites are returning 404's in our crawl but are visible when clicked on. Here is one example: https://www.theelementsofliving.com/recipe/citrus-energy-boosting-smoothie/print Any ideas as to why these are returning errors? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FirstService0 -
How to 301 Redirect /page.php to /page, after a RewriteRule has already made /page.php accessible by /page (Getting errors)
A site has its URLs with php extensions, like this: example.com/page.php I used the following rewrite to remove the extension so that the page can now be accessed from example.com/page RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rcseo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L] It works great. I can access it via the example.com/page URL. However, the problem is the page can still be accessed from example.com/page.php. Because I have external links going to the page, I want to 301 redirect example.com/page.php to example.com/page. I've tried this a couple of ways but I get redirect loops or 500 internal server errors. Is there a way to have both? Remove the extension and 301 the .php to no extension? By the way, if it matters, page.php is an actual file in the root directory (not created through another rewrite or URI routing). I'm hoping I can do this, and not just throw a example.com/page canonical tag on the page. Thanks!0 -
Will Using Attributes For Landing Pages In Magento Dilute Page Rank?
Hello Mozzers! We have an ecommerce site built on Magento. We would like to use attribute filters in our layered navigation for landing page purposes. Each page will have a unique URL, Meta Title and Meta Description. For example: URL: domain.com/art/abstract (category is Art, attribute is Abstract) Title: Abstract Art For Sale Meta: Blah Blah Blah Currently these attribute pages are not being indexed by google as they are set in google parameters. We would like to edit google parameters to start indexing some of the attribute filters that users search for, so they can be used as landing pages. Does anyone have experience with this? Is this a good idea? What are the consequences? Will this dilute Page Rank? Could this destroy the world? Cheers! MozAddict
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
Multiple Locations Google Places (URL's)?
I'm managing a restaurant chain with 10 locations. Can they all share the home page url of the corporate site in Google Places or is it better to link each location url separately? Meaning can I use www.company.com for all locations in Google places for all locations or is it better to go with www.company.com/location.html for each location. The page authority of the home page is 60 while individual location pages the page authority is in the 20's. Hope this makes sense. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YMD
Gary0 -
Hundreds of thousands of 404's on expired listings - issue.
Hey guys, We have a conundrum, with a large E-Commerce site we operate. Classified listings older than 45 days are throwing up 404's - hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. Note that Webmaster Tools peaks at 100,000. Many of these listings receive links. Classified listings that are less than 45 days show other possible products to buy based on an algorithm. It is not possible for Google to crawl expired listings pages from within our site. They are indexed because they were crawled before they expired, which means that many of them show in search results. -> My thought at this stage, for usability reasons, is to replace the 404's with content - other product suggestions, and add a meta noindex in order to help our crawl equity, and get the pages we really want to be indexed prioritised. -> Another consideration is to 301 from each expired listing to the category heirarchy to pass possible link juice. But we feel that as many of these listings are findable in Google, it is not a great user experience. -> Or, shall we just leave them as 404's? : google sort of says it's ok Very curious on your opinions, and how you would handle this. Cheers, Croozie. P.S I have read other Q & A's regarding this, but given our large volumes and situation, thought it was worth asking as I'm not satisfied that solutions offered would match our needs.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sichristie0