Category pages
-
I am a very basic question on managing categories in WordPress. We have an Android website, and we cover news, rumors, tips and tricks about new devices. We have been creating categories for the new devices or at least for the popular ones which are launched every year, and link to them internally with the hope that it would improve the page authority and ranking.
For example, we have a category page for Moto X, another one for Moto X (2014) and one more for Moto X (2015).
One of the reasons for creating a category was to ensure that it is easier for readers to get information about a particular device rather than going to a category page that has information about all the models.
However, the problem with their strategy we're now realizing is that it means we have to build page authority for the new category page from scratch, which can take time.
So we are thinking of reusing the same category for multiple models. So reuse the Moto X category page for Moto X (2016).
However, we are not sure if it would be right approach as we would be linking to the same category page with different anchor texts. So while it would be good to reuse a page rather than rebuild the page authority from scratch, would we be diluting the authority for the main keyword by using it for different models.
I would love to hear your thoughts on how we should be handling categories and internal links in this case.
-
Yeah, I think we need to mess around with the template files to make it look better.
Btw, the website in question is AndroidBeat.com. I will look into the schema markups, though the structure of the site is quite flat, so not sure if breadcrumbs would be useful.
When your website has to depend on advertising for revenues, page speed is difficult to optimize. I keep getting told that the page load cannot be improved further because of the ads on the website. So it is important to strike the right balance. If you know someone who can help with improving page load times then please let me know. I am happy to get a second opinion.
Thanks again for the suggestions. Any thoughts on this point:
How about internally linking to the same page with multiple anchor text. Wouldn't we end up confusing the bots. We have seen category pages doing well in some cases. So wouldn't this approach affect the ranking for such category pages that are doing well.
-
Thanks Martijn for the suggestions. We are going to try roll it out as soon as possible.
-
Implement AMP if the website has a blog.
Refer to https://www.ampproject.org/ for more information. Martijn is right though AMP took me 2 full days to implement from a cold start on one site. However using the wordpress plug in less than an hour for the second. So need to review in order of priority.On schema the easiest thing to implement would be breadcrumbs on each page. Schema is especially useful for websites with a blog, events, recipes or other dynamic content.
Again I hate to overreach with suggestions when I am not 100% familiar with a site and understand objectives and priorities. 95% of the time I end up starting with page loading speed... it has such a massive impact on every kpi if it is not optimized. tools.pingdom.com - so if page loading speed is on the agenda that is where I nearly always start.
Hope that assists.
-
AMP can be a lot of work when you really want to make sure that the pages look good and support everything that is related to the set-up itself. I recommend using the AMP Plugin that is available for WordPress and creating your own template files to support them afterwards so you can tweak whatever you want.
-
Thanks Clayton for the suggestions and the quick response. Rand's WBF was the one that got me to rethink our current approach. We have also realized that it is not helping with the rankings either. But had a few questions.
How about internally linking to the same page with multiple anchor text. Wouldn't we end up confusing the bots. We have seen category pages doing well in some cases. So wouldn't this approach affect the ranking for such category pages that are doing well.
Can you also point me to a resource for Schema markups?
We are also not able to get a good look and feel for AMP optimized pages. Any recommendations would be welcome.
-
The latter approach you have identified is the approach to adopt. The first approach is old school seo ie 1 keyword query = 1 page. This is no longer recommended. See Rand's WBF on the topic. https://moz.com/blog/8-old-school-seo-practices-not-effective-whiteboard-friday
Schema markups and if on a news post use AMP.
All the best hope that assists.
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
-
Doorway page penalty
Has Google changed their interpretation of Doorway pages?We do not sell widgets but allow me to use Widget for this example;If we sold 25 very different widgets an online vendor would typically have 1 "mother" website with 25 different inner pages, each page to explain each type of widget they sell.However, for the past 9 years our approach is to have 25 different websites, one for each widget. With these 25 sites we concentrated on ranking the home page only . All these sites link back to our (No idexed) "Mother' site via no follow links where we have our Shopping Cart and Terms of Business. We did this partly to avoid having 25 separate Shopping Carts and to avoid having to change our Terms 25 times each time that became necessary. But yes we also did this as it was so much easier to rank each different type of widget in the SERPS. Also we think its a better user experience as in our business buyers of yellow widgets will not be interested in blue widgetsWe have been reading for years that google does not like doorways pages but we were not 100% certain if they might regard our sites as such .This is because our approach has worked great for nine years. That is until December last year when all 95% our sites fell dramatically in the SERPS usually from page 1 to page 2 or 3. First thing we did was to go through all our sites and search for the obvious; toxic links, duplicate content, keyword density, https issues, mobility issues, anchor text, etc etc and of course content. We found no obvious problems that could affect 95% of the sites at the same time but we ordered new homepage content for most of our sites from expert seo writers. However, after putting on this new content 3 -4 weeks ago our sites have not moved up the SERPS at all.So we are left with the inescapable conclusion that our problem is because google sees and devalues our sites as doorway pages especially as 95% of your sites have been affected all at the same time Would any SEO experts on this forum agree or be able to offer an opinion?If so, what might be the solution going forward? We have 2 solutions under consideration;1) Remove all links from each of our 25 sites to our "mother Site" and put a shopping cart and our TOS on each of the 25 sites so they are all truly independent stand alone websites.2) Create 25 inner pages on our mother site (after removing the no index) , for each of the 25 widgets we sell , then 301 each of the 25 individual sites home pages to its inner page on the mother site . I think this might be the best solution partly as almost all of our higher ranking competitors are ranking their inner pages not their homepage. But I worry if these 25 sites will really pass much link juice if they have been devalued by Google.?Any advice will be gratefully received.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apcsilver90 -
Schema markup concerning category pages on an ecommerce site
We are adding json+ld data to an ecommerce site and myself and one of the other people working on the site are having a minor disagreement on things. What it comes down to is how to mark up the category page. One of us says it needs to be marked up with as an Itempage, https://schema.org/ItemPage The other says it needs to be marked up as products, with multiple product instances in the schema, https://schema.org/Product The main sticking point on the Itemlist is that Itemlist is a child of intangible, so there is a feeling that should be used for things like track listings or other arbitrary data.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LesleyPaone2 -
Would it work to place H1 (or important page keywords) at the top of your page in HTML and move lower on page with CSS?
I understand that the H1 tag is no longer heavily correlated with stronger ranking signals but it is more important that Keywords or keyphrases are at the top of a page. My question is, if I just put my important keyword (or H1) toward the top of my page in the HTML and move it towards the middle/lower portion with css position elements, will this still be viewed by Googlebot as important keywords toward the top of my page? QCaxMHL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content (with and without www)
How can we resolve pages with duplicate page content? With and without www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | directiq
Thanks in advance.0 -
Removing pages from index
My client is running 4 websites on ModX CMS and using the same database for all the sites. Roger has discovered that one of the sites has 2050 302 redirects pointing to the clients other sites. The Sitemap for the site in question includes 860 pages. Google Webmaster Tools has indexed 540 pages. Roger has discovered 5200 pages and a Site: query of Google reveals 7200 pages. Diving into the SERP results many of the pages indexed are pointing to the other 3 sites. I believe there is a configuration problem with the site because the other sites when crawled do not have a huge volume of redirects. My concern is how can we remove from Google's index the 2050 pages that are redirecting to the other sites via a 302 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tinbum0 -
Page Count in Webmaster Tools Index Status Versus Page Count in Webmaster Tools Sitemap
Greeting MOZ Community: I run www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, a real estate website in New York City. The page count in Google Webmaster Tools Index status for our site is 850. The page count in our Webmaster Tools Sitemap is 637. Why is there a discrepancy between the two? What does the Google Webmaster Tools Index represent? If we filed a removal request for pages we did not want indexed, will these pages still show in the Google Webmaster Tools page count despite the fact that they no longer display in search results? The number of pages displayed in our Google Webmaster Tools Index remains at about 850 despite the removal request. Before a site upgrade in June the number of URLs in the Google Webmaster Tools Index and Google Webmaster Site Map were almost the same. I am concerned that page bloat has something to do with a recent drop in ranking. Thanks everyone!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Should I NoIndex NoFollow my BUYNOW page?
Hi, As stated in the title, I am wondering if I should NOINDEX NOFOLLOW my shopping cart page - it is actually a buy now page that receives in the URL the Item ID - only one item per purchase. I received duplication errors so now I added canonical and I wonder if I should simply remove it altogether. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Google Filter? Drop from top first page to bottom second page?
My site has dropped from the first page top spots to the bottom second page, about 2 month ago. From time to time it reappears in the first page, is this some kind of google filter? How do I solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ofer230