My blog's categories are winning over my landing pages, what to do?

[BeytzNet]

Hi

My blogs categories for the ecommerce site are by subject and are similar to the product landing pages.

Example

Domain.com/laptops that sells laptops

Domain.com/blog/laptops that shows news and articles on laptops

Within the blog posts the links of anchor laptop are to the store.

What to do?

Thanks

[benjaminmarcinc]

This happens to me as well, are the title tags and descriptions similar to each other? What i did in one instance was redirected the blog post to the desired page, but there may be a better solution for you.

[David-Kley]

When you say winning, do you mean ranking higher, or getting indexed instead of your store's pages?

Chances are your blog posts are targeted directly at certain questions and information and have links pointing back at them. Do your store pages have the same? Most stores have an area when you can add information to the landing pages.

Can you provide a link to the store, so that I may have a closer look? It's difficult to give you a accurate answer without seeing how the store/blog is set up.

[webmethod]

I agree with the 2 responses above.

Your blog is probably ranking because it has more links/shares (or at least more recent links/shares) and potentially more relevant content. You should try improving the content on the laptops products page.

You should also make it very easy for someone visiting your blog to get to your products to purchase them. If the blog is well written and useful/engaging, this might be a good opportunity for your content marketing to form a key part of your customer journey.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, thanks for your question! You've received some excellent responses. Did any of them answer your question? If so, please mark one or more as a "good answer". If not, please provide us with the requested details so we can help you resolve this. Thanks!

Christy

[BeytzNet]

Hi methodicalweb,

I have a relatively new site so links are not the reason...

[BeytzNet]

David-Kley

You are correct about the blog posts themselves and that's ok.
The problem I'm having is that the category pages rank too high (more than the category pages).

I am trying to add information to the category pages as well as de-indexing (NOINDEX) one of the category pages as a test...

[BeytzNet]

I didn't get a yes/no answer but based on the above I'm currently trying to add some information to the category pages (snippets to the important articles).

Another thing I just tried is to add NOINDEX on one of the category pages and see how it works.

This way google will still crawl it but just won't serve it in the SERPS (which is fine by me).

I will update how it works

[Christy-Correll]

Great, it is always wise to test changes! Looking forward to hearing about your results.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there! How did things turn out?

[BeytzNet]

Hi denverish,

The results for now are quite interesting... As I mentioned above I added texts to the category pages which I wanted to turn into landing pages. In one case, I also added NOINDEX to the matching category on the blog and in the others I didn't.

The result was that where I added the NOINDEX the blog category obviously disappeared (was mid second page) and an article from deep within the site replaced it - BUT NOT the wished landing page. Keep in mind that the category page on the blog linked to posts that each linked back to the desired category page.

The other pages on which I added the texts are gaining real good placements within the SERPS. Most are now on top of page 2 and are tougher phrases.

It is as if all of the posts within the category I now "NOINDEX" have lost their weight!

I am today planning on removing the NOINDEX and will see in a month or so (hopefully sooner) where I stand.

I am surprised from the result!