Ranking for homepage & category page?

[EileenCleary]

We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February.  The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content.  We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage.  The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase.  For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes.

When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other.  The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help.

1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.)

2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time.  We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com".  Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Remove the canonical - consider having both pages ranking a good thing. I don't know why you would canonicalize your homepage to an internal page, don't do that!

Let your homepage be brandname.com and keep your internal page the brandname.com/cotton-tees - that's just a best practice and logical. Your homepage should NOT be an internal page - it should be the face of your web presence and a way to showcase all of the great internal content on the website.

I would also look into opportunities to link to that internal page off the homepage.

Hope this helps - good luck!