Category pages

[Gautam]

I am a very basic question on managing categories in WordPress. We have an Android website, and we cover news, rumors, tips and tricks about new devices. We have been creating categories for the new devices or at least for the popular ones which are launched every year, and link to them internally with the hope that it would improve the page authority and ranking.

For example, we have a category page for Moto X, another one for Moto X (2014) and one more for Moto X (2015).

One of the reasons for creating a category was to ensure that it is easier for readers to get information about a particular device rather than going to a category page that has information about all the models.

However, the problem with their strategy we're now realizing is that it means we have to build page authority for the new category page from scratch, which can take time.

So we are thinking of reusing the same category for multiple models. So reuse the Moto X category page for Moto X (2016).

However, we are not sure if it would be right approach as we would be linking to the same category page with different anchor texts. So while it would be good to reuse a page rather than rebuild the page authority from scratch, would we be diluting the authority for the main keyword by using it for different models.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how we should be handling categories and internal links in this case.

[ClaytonJ]

The latter approach you have identified is the approach to adopt. The first approach is old school seo ie 1 keyword query = 1 page. This is no longer recommended. See Rand's WBF on the topic. https://moz.com/blog/8-old-school-seo-practices-not-effective-whiteboard-friday

Schema markups and if on a news post use AMP.

All the best hope that assists.

[Gautam]

Thanks Clayton for the suggestions and the quick response. Rand's WBF was the one that got me to rethink our current approach. We have also realized that it is not helping with the rankings either. But had a few questions.

How about internally linking to the same page with multiple anchor text. Wouldn't we end up confusing the bots. We have seen category pages doing well in some cases. So wouldn't this approach affect the ranking for such category pages that are doing well.

Can you also point me to a resource for Schema markups?

We are also not able to get a good look and feel for AMP optimized pages. Any recommendations would be welcome.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

AMP can be a lot of work when you really want to make sure that the pages look good and support everything that is related to the set-up itself. I recommend using the AMP Plugin that is available for WordPress and creating your own template files to support them afterwards so you can tweak whatever you want.

[ClaytonJ]

Implement AMP if the website has a blog.
Refer to https://www.ampproject.org/ for more information.  Martijn is right though AMP took me 2 full days to implement from a cold start on one site. However using the wordpress plug in less than an hour for the second. So need to review in order of priority.

On schema the easiest thing to implement would be breadcrumbs on each page. Schema is especially useful for websites with a blog, events, recipes or other dynamic content.

Again I hate to overreach with suggestions when I am not 100% familiar with a site and understand objectives and priorities. 95% of the time I end up starting with page loading speed... it has such a massive impact on every kpi if it is not optimized. tools.pingdom.com - so if page loading speed is on the agenda that is where I nearly always start.

Hope that assists.

[Gautam]

Thanks Martijn for the suggestions. We are going to try roll it out as soon as possible.

[Gautam]

Yeah, I think we need to mess around with the template files to make it look better.

Btw, the website in question is AndroidBeat.com. I will look into the schema markups, though the structure of the site is quite flat, so not sure if breadcrumbs would be useful.

When your website has to depend on advertising for revenues, page speed is difficult to optimize. I keep getting told that the page load cannot be improved further because of the ads on the website. So it is important to strike the right balance. If you know someone who can help with improving page load times then please let me know. I am happy to get a second opinion.

Thanks again for the suggestions. Any thoughts on this point:

How about internally linking to the same page with multiple anchor text. Wouldn't we end up confusing the bots. We have seen category pages doing well in some cases. So wouldn't this approach affect the ranking for such category pages that are doing well.