Homepage vs. Product page competition

[minutiae]

I think my homepage and basic product listing page may be competing..

We have a very old domain with lots of links w/ generic anchor text ( click here, etc. )

That page is http://mybrand.com which Google ranks for our "widgets" search term.

We have a page http://ourbrand.com/widgets that lists the 5 or 6 basic widgets we sell. This page is indexed also, but doesn't have nearly as many links since it is new compared to the age of the domain.

After reading this.. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization I I'm not really sure I can remove all "widgets" links from our homepage, since that's a core part of our site's menu / hierarchy.

So maybe my best effort would be to reorganize the page so that the homepage focuses on Our Brand Name Widgets .. and let the product page focus on the widgets keyword. Is having those two pages serve to represent those two separate but similar keywords feasible?

Thoughts?

[NickEubanks]

Hey Bob,

I ran into a similar issue a while back where one of the sites I was working on was ranking well (top 3 positions) for the top selling product, but it was the homepage. We were happy but at the same time knew based on the competition hat we would most certainly only be able to achieve limited results with ths page as it was truly not the best result for the query.

What we did was to make sure the text on the homepage covered all of the top level product categories and reworked the URL architecture to be more friendly. We create category landing pages for each or our products, i.e. http://brand.com/product-category and then linked to individual listing pages for each product from those category pages (pretty typical eCommerce architecture)

This in combination with some focused anchor text link building to the category pages achieved the result we were looking for. We now rank #1 for the product term with the product category page - which also happens to be an exact match at the sub-directory level for our target search term. Best of all, our homepage now ranks in position 3 for the same term (it didnt move, but was surpassed by our product category page)

This change in the architecture (both URL and content) brought about a number of beneficial trickle-down results and we are now actually ranking very highly for almost all of our product keywords at the category level. These results also reinforce that strong target anchor text on inbound links is still your friend.

I hope that helps?

Cheers,
Nick