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
-
Can subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BHeffernan1 -
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
Google's Knowledge Panel
Hi Moz Community. Has anyone noticed a pattern in the websites that Google pulls in to populate knowledge Panels? For example, for a lot of queries Google keeps pulling data from a specific source over and over again, and the data shown in the Knowledge Panel isn't on the target page. Is it possible that Google simply favors some sites over others and no matter what you do, you'll never make it into the Knowledge box? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Why has my home page replaced my sub-category page for set of keywords? Happened 2x in last 2 weeks for day or so only to fix itself. What is going on?
Today I noticed a really weird problem. Our LED Step Lights page (https://www.pegasuslighting.com/led-step-lights.html) has been replaced in the search results with our home page. See screenshot below. As I started to research what was going on, I noticed that this same thing must have happened on January 26 and 27 because in my Analytics I can see that our LED Step Lights sub-cat page had a sudden drop in traffic on those two days only to bounce back again on the 28th. See screenshot below. Our LED Step Lights page has had no changes in content, meta information, or anything in months. We have done no recent link building to this page in years. I don't understand what is going on. This is a popular page for us generating decent traffic. I really don't understand what is going on or even how to try and resolve this problem. I checked our Search Console. No messages. No manual web spam actions. Nothing to suggest that anything is going on except for the weird drops in traffic. Has anyone ever seen this happen before? Does anyone have any ideas as to what may be going on? serp-led-step-lights.png organic-traffic-drops.png search-console-led-step-lights.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cajohnson0 -
What are Soft 404's and are they a problem
Hi, I have some old pages that were coming up in google WMT as a 404. These had links into them so i thought i'd do a 301 back to either the home page or to a relevant category or page. However these are now listed in WMT as soft 404's. I'm not sure what this means and whether google is saying it doesn't like this? Any advice welcomed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Help my site it's not being indexed
Hello... We have a client, that had arround 17K visits a month... Last september he hired a company to do a redesign of his website....They needed to create a copy of the site on a different subdomain on another root domain... so I told them to block that content in order to not affect my production site, cause it was going to be an exact replica of the content but different design.... The developmet team did it wrong and blocked the production site (using robots.txt), so my site lost all it's organica traffic, which was 85-90% of the total traffic and now only get a couple of hundreds visits a month... First I thought we had been somehow penalized, however when I the other site recieving new traffic and being indexed i realized so I switched the robots.txt and created 301 redirect from the subdomain to the production site. After resending sitemaps, links to google+ and many things I can't get google to reindex my site.... when i do a site:domain.com search in google I only get 3 results. Its been now almost 2 month and honestly dont know what to do.... Any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
What Makes Good Content for Category Pages
Hello, We're putting (roughly, depending on the category) 500 words under the products or categories under category pages. We're having a writer do these who has to learn the products from scratch. With over 100 categories, it's not possible for the client to write 500 words for each one. We're wondering, 1. What should go into a category description? 2. How do you prep a writer to write these, and is it possible to do so and get good content? I'm afraid that we're writing just words for long tails, and I know on the product pages, home page, and articles that it has to be the best content, probably written by the client himself if he is knowledgable enough. Open to your suggestions on what should be in these, how long they should be, and who should write them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
.com ranking over other ccTLD's that were created
We had a ecommerce website that used to function as the website for every other locale we had around the world. For example the French version was Domain.com/fr_FR/ or a German version in English would be Domain.com/en_DE/. Recently we moved all of our larger international locales to their corresponding ccTLD so no we have Domain.fr and Domain.de.(This happened about two months ago) The problem with this is that we are getting hardly any organic traffic and sales on these new TLD's. I am thinking this is because they are new but I am not positive. If you compare the traffic we used to see on the old domain versus the traffic we see on the new domain it is a lot less. I am currently going through to make sure that all of the old pages are not up and the next thing I want to know is for the old pages would it be better to use a 301 re-direct or a rel=canonical to the new ccTLD to avoid duplicate content and those old pages from out ranking our new pages? Also what are some other causes for our traffic being down so much? It just seems that there is a much bigger problem but I don't know what it could be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0