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I wouldn't say a penalty but be prepared for a "dance". Google don't want you knowing if you are increasing rank so they may lower your SERP positions temporarily before it bounces back higher than it was to begin with. We have found exactly this and experienced sever ranking fluctuations when making fortnightly changes. We now only make changes once every 30-60 days and wait for the dust to settle before evaluating the outcome.

Just thought I'd update in case anyone else is finding product pages are outranking category pages like I was. (also of note this site is built on Magento)

I changed all product names / URL's / Image meta so that it no longer included the keyword on 4th September.

Used to be: Brand Model# Keyword (Product type)

Now just: Brand Model#

Google did a little dance and now my Category pages rank (for both keyword and keyword plural) rather than product pages. Rankings increased to position #3 for keyword and to #1 for keyword plural (from position 11) about a week ago and are now steady at those positions.

It seems categories with only a few products were not affected (seen as over optimized) but those categories with 30+ products were.

Change them all back to INDEX, FOLLOW and use Canonical plugin by yoast.

Canonical URL's for Magento • Yoast (sorry if links not allowed)

Some products on our site appear in six categories and we have no issues with duplicate content whatsoever using the above.

Hi Jarno, thanks for the reply and sorry I wasn't clearer in my question...

For the singular keyword, the category page will not rank at all despite being at position one for a site:myurl.com keyword search. Google shows a product page instead. No issues for the plural version.

I figured that the keyword usage in the product anchor was cannibalizing. (The On-Page tool was suggesting this also). I was reluctant to change as no other category on the site has the same issue despite having the same configuration AND I didn't want to risk losing ranking on each of the products.

I think I may have answered my own question. I've removed the keyword from each of the product links and anchors and will see what happens.

I'm wondering how Keyword use in Product links on Category pages can affect a pages rank?

I have 1 site where this seems to be an issue but not on all categories. For this site, a site: keyword search ranks the category page as no.1 in the SERPS but a non-site: search shows 1 of the many products within the category as the highest ranking page (currently 20 in google) on this site.

This product is probably the least likely to generate a conversion due to it's cost so this is less than ideal. The plural search of the keyword shows the category page and it ranks higher than the keyword itself (currently 9 in google)

Category name and URL = keyword. The category is paginated with 12 products per page.

Product URL and anchor text is brand-model-type (where type = keyword)

I'd like to keep the product URLs and anchors as they are if I can as they are well searched terms themselves but I want to optimize a category page to rank for the keyword itself.

Have any of you overcome a similar issue? Would adding more text to the category page dilute the issue?

<cite>www.kitchenwaredirect.com.au</cite> springs to mind for me..

Change them all back to INDEX, FOLLOW and use Canonical plugin by yoast.

Canonical URL's for Magento • Yoast (sorry if links not allowed)

Some products on our site appear in six categories and we have no issues with duplicate content whatsoever using the above.