Avoiding keyword cannibalisation in Wordpress Structure

[councilflat]

Hi all,

I've been planning the WordPress structure for a client for a long time, and soon need to get started. I keep coming back to this problem / question, whereby there will be a static Page with a name like "Christmas Collection", but there also has to be a Category called "Christmas" to accomodate new content.  Is this likely to cause serious keyword cannabalisation?

It's a non-ecommerce site

To elaborate we need to have the following static Pages:

christmas collection

easter collection

halloween Collection

and each of these Page's will be populated with related Posts (based on category ID) after the Page's content. And these corresponding Categories need to be similarly named.

As there's no apparent relation between Pages and Categories, I keep coming back to the concern that having a Page named "Christmas Collection" and a Category called "Christmas"  is a big SEO NO NO.

Any thoughts, opinions, workarounds much appreciated!

Regards,

c

[councilflat]

Well, considering there will be only one page which will probably mention the words, christmas, and all related words (not so much phrases), plus the category that will contain posts with those same words, it's a fight i can't really avoid!

But I understand what your saying, the search engines should figure it out.

Ok, i'll get on and create this website!

Many thanks for your insight!

c

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I honestly don't see any problem with what you are wanting to do. That certainly wouldn't cause me concern.

Just remember that you don't want pages to fight against each other in terms of which one is going to serve the content for a given phrase. However, don't try too hard otherwise you might find Penguin coming along and giving you a hit before you even get anywhere. OOP (over optimisation penalties) are quite common when you try to do everything you possibly can.

Just keep it clean and you should be fine without having to worry about trying too hard.

And just remember that Wordpress has lots of little nuances that could be classed as problematic by other SEO's, but in reality, it is invariably pretty good at what it does, and does without penalty out of the box.

Andy

[councilflat]

Thanks Andy.  the URLs would end up looking like:

domain.com/christmas-collection for the page

domain.com/christmas for the Category

and

domain.com/christmas/post-title for categorised Posts

We will certainly want them both indexed, as the content will be unique.  And great, i hope!

I'm thinking of going down the route of using the Category template in place of the Page.  In other words, create a category template with content at the top, and the posts listed underneath.  But, I'm no code ninja, and from what i've read Category templates are limited.

Thanks again

[Andy.Drinkwater]

No, this won't be an issue. All you are talking about is a URL structure, but then you can get round this by changing your permalink structure if you wish.

However, I know others who have added the categories to their Robots.txt and others who have noindex'ed them. I also see many other sites that do absolutely nothing and with nothing detrimental in the SERPs.

It's not a biggie, but I am sure others will have some suggestions for you if you do want to do something about it.

Just focus on the great unique content on the pages and this will be Google's primary concern.

Andy