How to make sure category pages rank higher than product pages?
-
Hi,
This question is E-Commerce related. We have product categories dividing products by color. Let's say we have the category 'blue toy cars' and a product called 'blue toy car racer', both of these could rank for the keyword 'blue toy car'.
How do we make sure the category 'blue toy cars' ranks above the product 'blue toy car racer'? Or is the category page automatically ranked higher because of the higher page authority of that page?
Alex
-
One of us is having a senior moment.
You wrote: "If this was my site we would get rid of the product pages and display all of the color choices on one page."
You sent a link to a product page. I was expecting a link to a psychedelic category page saturated with pictures, colors, content and "buy now" buttons with no links to products.
The Target bread crumbs show a hierarchy and presentation as proposed by Allen.
I get it. And agree. With both of you.
-
See how Target gives you all of the colors of this Rachel Ray cook set on one page...
http://www.target.com/p/rachael-ray-10-piece-porcelain-cook-set/-/A-14595398#prodSlot=medium_1_2
I would improve on this by listing the colors in text outside of the JavaScript and adding the most popular colors in the title tag.
Rachel Ray Cook Set | Red Blue Green Orange
-
I'd like to see this in action. Can you share a link EGOL?
-
Thank you. In my view this would make sense to the users as well.
-
Actually have recommended products on page, or other products in the same category. You could have it pop up a fancy / color/ thickbox when people add to the cart and recommend other products, something like this http://module-presta.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/thumbnail/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/i/m/imgforuserguide_popup_cart_02.jpg
There are all kinds of different things that you can do to cross sell. Look at what amazon does and how they operate, they optimize the product pages. On them they have lots of different product offers.
-
If this was my site we would get rid of the product pages and display all of the color choices on one page. Then you have a product page AND a category page in one.
-
Good point. From a conversion standpoint it be much better if people would land on a product page immediately. Although it's almost impossible for people to see our other products when they never land on a category page, and this would mean a decrease in order value...
-
Alex,
I would make the category page Toy cars with the separate product links: Blue toy cars, Red toy cars, Racer cars, etc. By linking one higher category page to a lower product page you are establishing your own page ranking "Score" that is read by the search engines as higher or lower in authority.
Your meta descriptions will further reinforce this higher archery by having the category pages describe most of the terms used in the lower level pages. Then be very specific on the separate product pages.
Now if someone searches for toy cars your category page is a higher result offering an entire selection of toy cars. But if your customer wants to type a longer search term "Blue racer toy cars" they will be directed to your specific product page.
-
Most category pages are pretty content shallow. They usually just have basic product info that links to the product pages. Make sure you have category pages built out with plenty unique content that would be valuable to your customers and the bots. It seems that people like to link directly to the product page so do your best to acquire links to the category level.
-
Honestly in my opinion you are going to have a hard time making the category rank higher than the product. Especially since things like rich data only supports one offer per page. I have no proof, but I would off the hip say that search engine want to put people on a product page, not a category page.
One thing to take into account to is conversion rate, just about every study says you convert more with a product as a landing page vs any other page in a site.
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
-
Lost Rankings Late April Even Though We Have A Mobile Site
I have noticed a significant drop in rankings since late April. It is about a 30% drop in organic from Google. This is despite the fact that we launched a mobile site before the update. What gives? Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
Web Design | | inhouseseo0 -
No-index part of page
Hi All, I want to copy articles from CNN/Bloomberg/etc and I want to show the content to my users in Lightbox (CSS), but the problem is duplicate content. Do you have any idea how can I no-index part of page/content?
Web Design | | JohnPalmer0 -
Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings
Hi, Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings. Our desktop site & mobile site has same urls. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Multi-page articles, pagination, best practice...
A couple months ago we mitigated a 12-year-old site -- about 2,000 pages -- to WordPress.
Web Design | | jmueller0823
The transition was smooth (301 redirects), we haven't lost much search juice. We have about 75 multi-page articles (posts); we're using a plugin (Organize Series) to manage the pagination. On the old site, all of the pages in the series had the same title. I've since heard this is not a good SEO practice (duplicate titles). The url's were the same too, with a 'number' (designating the page number) appended to the title text. Here's my question: 1. Is there a best practice for titles & url's of multi-page articles? Let's say we have an article named: 'This is an Article' ... What if I name the pages like this:
-- This is an Article, Page 1
-- This is an Article, Page 2
-- This is an Article, Page 3 Is that a good idea? Or, should each page have a completely different title? Does it matter?
** I think for usability, the examples above are best; they give the reader context. What about url's ? Are these a good idea? /this-is-an-article-01, /this-is-an-article-02, and so on...
Does it matter? 2. I've read that maybe multi-page articles are not such a good idea -- from usability and SEO standpoints. We tend to limit our articles to about 800 words per page. So, is it better to publish 'long' articles instead of multi-page? Does it matter? I think I'm seeing a trend on content sites toward long, one-page articles. 3. Any other gotchas we should be aware of, related to SEO/ multi-page? Long post... we've gone back-and-forth on this a couple times and need to get this settled.
Thanks much! Jim0 -
Nav / Sitemap Question. Using a "services" page vs just linking directly to individual service page?
Okay, so our company offers video production, web design, and web marketing services. While we do offer these services individually, our goal is to get our clients to integrate these services together. Our nav is currently like so : home - about - video - web design - web marketing - blog - contact Now I've seen businesses and agencies also use a nav with a "services" button instead of listing out their service offerings (if they have more than 1, like us). The services button usually links to a category page or has a drop down with links to the company's individual services. I'm wondering if there is any benefit to having a main services page like this and linking to the individual pages off of it (video ,web design, marketing, etc). Or if we should just keep it the way we have it now (since we've already got some page authority on the individual service pages). I know this may not be the most important aspect of our site and we may be over-thinking it but any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
Drastic rankings drop
SOS SEOMozzers hello all. I woke up this morning to find out our rankings for two main keywords: 1. internet marketing firm
Web Design | | vijayvasu
2. marketing firm dropped from being #8 on google to not being invthe top 50. last week we upgraded the site to HTML5 . We checked the on page via pro tools and everthing seemed fine. We checked Google analytics ( traffic was beginning to fall) and we checked webmaster tools - ( there were not critical issues etc) So now i am bewildered as to what possible happened to wipe us of the search. Please can you help - the site is www.gunshotdigital.com0 -
Help choosing an E-Commerce platform for SEO, Product Videos and Usability today?
7 months ago I asked the same question.. I am reaching out to all of you What platforms do you hate? and want to meet the guys or girls that coded it in a dark ally way... and What platforms are good? I keep looking at the code of some sites and its shocking. No GA Async code, No canonical tags.. it goes on and on.. If you want to pitch to me and you are in the UK email me robert@thefurnituremarket.co.uk
Web Design | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Seo for flash home page?
I have a client who insists their home page be a single graphic image of their logo with php menus linking to all of the other pages up top. This appears to me to be an seo nightmare. They seem to be unwilling to have anything to do with changing the appearance and want to rely on seo for "all the other pages" on the site. What's an SEO to do in this situation? Is it possible to have a flash image that lands on a "homepage" for google to crawl, rather than a single image? What's the best seo approach here?
Web Design | | peaceland0