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
-
How to Canonicalise all filter pages (URL parameters) to the main category
Hi guys, I am working on an e-commerce site that's running in Shopify. I noticed that the filter pages do not have canonical tags pointing to their respective main categories. I doubt that the action needed is to canonicalise each filter pages to the main category as it would take time (there are a lot of filter URLs involved). Do you know any technical coding to do in Shopify to have all filter pages canonicalise to its main category? Keen to hear from you. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup0 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
What happens to a domain in SERPs when it's set to redirect to another?
We have just acquired a competing website and are wondering whether to leave it running as is for now, or set the domain to redirect to our own site. If we set up this redirect, what would happen to the old site in Google SERPs? Would the site drop off from results? If so, would we capture this new search traffic or is it a free for all and all sites compete for the search traffic as normal? Thanks in advance. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
Low Page Authority in existing article in blog Any Ideas to improve it?
Im managing a blog that has a lot of articles with Page Authority 1.I have already checked with On-page Grader that these articles are Grade A, so they have the SEO structure perfect and would like to know any ideas to get this Page Authority rise in existing articles that are already written, like changes that can effectively be made this page authority get higher. Thanks in advance and regards, Jorge Pascual
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goperformancelabs0 -
Consolidating numerous landing pages using similar search terms
Hi, The site I am working on currently uses numerous pages for search terms with similar keywords. vehicle wrapping / vehicle wraps / car wrapping / car wraps / van wrapping / van wraps etc Now obviously i want to bring these into one to help create one high authority page covering all terms. At present the "car wraps" page is ranking for quite a few of these terms. Am i best to stick with this or chose the highest search term being car wrapping, and pass the dribbles of juice from the rest and "car wraps" onto this? This is aimed at a local demographic so the local terms will be thrown in too unless you think the places pages will work in favour? Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lee4dcm0 -
MOZ crawl report says category pages blocked by meta robots but theyr'e not?
I've just run a SEOMOZ crawl report and it tells me that the category pages on my site such as http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/category/online-dating/ are blocked by meta robots and have the meta robots tag noindex,follow. This was the case a couple of days ago as I run wordpress and am using the SEO Category updater plugin. By default it appears it makes categories noindex, follow. Therefore I edited the plugin so that the default was index, follow as I want google to index the category pages so that I can build links to them. When I open the page in a browser and view source the tags show as index, follow which adds up. Why then is the SEOMOZ report telling me they are still noindex,follow? Presumably the crawl is in real time and should pick up the new follow tag or is it perhaps because its using data from an old crawl? As yet these pages aren't indexed by google. Any help is much appreciated! Thanks Sam.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Category Pages up - Product Pages down... what would help?
Hi I mentioned yesterday how one of our sites was losing rank on product pages. What steps do you take to improve the SERPS of product pages, in this case home/category/product is the tree. There isn't really any internal linking, except one link from the category page to each product, would setting up a host of internal links perhaps "similar products" linking them together be a place to start? How can I improve my ranking of these more deeply internal pages? Not just internal links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Rel canonical element for different URL's
Hello, We have a new client that has several sites with the exact same content. They do this for tracking purposes. We are facing political objections to combine and track differently. Basically, we have no choice but to deal with the situation given. We want to avoid duplicate content issues, and want to SEO only one of the sites. The other sites don't really matter for SEO (they have off-line campaigns pointing to them) we just want one of the sites to get all the credit for the content. My questions: 1. Can we use the rel canonical element on the irrelevent pages/URL's to point to the site we care about? I think I remember Matt Cutts saying this can't be done across URL's. Am I right or wrong? 2. If we can't, what options do I have (without making the client change their entire tracking strategy) to make the site we are SEO'ing the relevant content? Thanks a million! Todd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GravitateOnline0